Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  The other song is, of course, ‘Grantchester Meadows’. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes or a crack musicologist to work that out. Many visitors to the place come because of the song, perhaps a favourite once smoked along to in bedsit and crashpad, and the lyrics are framed in the nearby museum. ‘Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon … and a river of green is sliding beneath the trees/laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.’

  In the distance I can hear Benjy barking, the sun comes out and warms my face and a light aircraft drones overhead. It is just gone noon and, in some mystical sense that feels a little embarrassing to recall, I am at the very centre of Middle England with the universe gently wheeling around me.

  ‘You total arse, Greg.’

  Ah well, it was good while it lasted. I am pulled back from the edge of slumber by the sounds coming from a punt in the distance. Two boys and a girl, the boys clearly showing off for the girl’s benefit. She’s got soaking wet and it’s stopped being funny. They think it is, though, and they laugh exaggeratedly and theatrically as they pass between them a bottle of pinkish plonk. One day, they may be called upon to take out your liver or discover a new star. Let them have their fun for now. The serious stuff comes soon enough.

  Vaughan Williams was a high-spirited student once too, and not a very diligent one either. His grades were middling at the Royal College of Music and he later said that he learned more from his fellow students than he did from the traditional teaching of his tutors, which sounds suspiciously like a posthoc justification for mucking about to me. No wonder I like him so much. Later he became a student again, studying orchestration under Ravel in Paris and acquiring a ‘little French polish’, and he bloomed into the finest English composer of his age – and a very English one.

  You’d be hard pushed to find a more English spot than Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, where the composer was born. It sits just inside the Cotswolds and near the Wiltshire border, not far from Cricklade and five miles from the fleshpots of the urban jungle that is Cirencester. It has a handsome church, a village green, an annual scarecrow trail and a classic Giles Gilbert Scott K6 design ‘Jubilee’ red telephone box commissioned by the GPO to mark King George V’s Silver Jubilee of 1935. At the time of writing its football team languishes in tenth place in the Cirencester and District Football League between Avonvale United and Golden Farm. The reserves have withdrawn from Division Two for mysterious and unexplained reasons.

  In contrast to Stratford or Haworth it wears its pride lightly. There is no giant animatronic Vaughan Williams to welcome you to the village. There is no Lark Ascending rollercoaster or Sea Symphony log flume. There isn’t even a Tallis Fantasia tea rooms, just a shy addition to the road sign: ‘Welcome To Down Ampney, Birthplace of the composer Vaughan Williams.’ Even that wasn’t there when I first came here about ten years ago, soon after I’d fallen in love with his music. Then there was just a modest display of photos in All Saints’ church where his father was the vicar. As I wandered around it, ‘in awkward reverence’ as Philip Larkin puts it in his wonderful poem ‘Church Going’, a smiling lady swept the pews and arranged the flowers. ‘We’re very proud of him,’ she said, ‘though he really didn’t stay here very long. Went to London. He didn’t like the countryside much. Too smelly.’

  Since then the village has got a little less bashful about their favourite son. In May 2008 they staged a Vaughan Williams day with celebrations of his music and, for twenty pounds, lunch and a guided tour of Pilgrims, his childhood home. Later a tenor sang songs in the church. According to the village website, ‘Celebrities attending included Sir Bernard Lovell, of Jodderell (sic) bank fame, and Bill Turnbull, Newscaster, whom some of you may recognise as one of the celebrities in Strictly Come Dancing.’ A rapacious and venal cash-in it is not.

  Down Ampney’s Vaughan Williams connection lives on in a musical way too. Though a lifelong agnostic and pinkish lefty – another aspect of the man the caricatures ignore – the composer was fond of setting his own hymn tunes. One of the most famous is ‘Come Down O Love Divine’, or as it is now known in honour of Vaughan Williams’ birthplace, ‘Down Ampney’. The hymn tunes are never going to be my favourites of his work, not even the lovely ones like ‘Rhosymedre’. ‘Down Ampney’, with its plonking changes, melodies designed for lusty unsophisticated singing and dreary resolutions at the end of every verse, reeks to me of draughty church halls and interminable services, wondering how much of this stuff is there left and will it still be light enough to play football in the park.

  Some people love it though. Look how many people watch Songs of Praise. And this is from a web forum called Ship of Fools, where contributors can excoriate the most hated kinds of people they know and condemn them to eternal damnation:

  ‘I call to Hell all those who take it upon themselves to lengthen the minim (half-note) at the halfway mark in Vaughan Williams’ fabulous tune “Down Ampney”. This includes the editors of the latest Anglican Church of Canada hymn-book (Comic Praise), but also the musicians on BBC Choral Evensong broadcast recently from St Endellion in Cornwall. It deflates the whole feeling of movement … Bring back the Inquisition, I say …’

  There is something of the very soul of Middle England in this too, I feel. The feeling that despite the stolidity and stoicism of gentle people you can push them thus far and no further. You can bomb us, flood us, throw us out of work, but muck about with our salad cream or phone boxes or the minims in our hymn tunes and you’ll see that we ‘can go from a Chamberlain to a Churchill in a New York minute’, as an American I once met observed.

  If they are still a little coy in Down Ampney, by contrast the Malverns come over as a cross between Saatchi and Saatchi, Rio Tinto-Zinc and Max Hastings, a drooling publicity-hungry raptor that will stop at nothing to sell, sell, sell. And what they are selling is a piano tuner’s son from Worcestershire who used to be the bandmaster at the Worcester lunatic asylum.

  For ex-pats, spinsters and Telegraph readers, Edward Elgar embodies Middle Englishness in music. Whereas Vaughan Williams was a big dishevelled bear of a man in a landslide of ill-fitting suit who made Patrick Moore look like Audrey Hepburn, Elgar even looks the part. With his neat centre parting, extravagant moustache, high starched collars and prim, stiff-backed expression, you can just imagine him saying, ‘This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you, my boy.’ Even his local paper the Worcester News recently admitted his image was that of a dull old country gent with a huge moustache. Like Vaughan Williams’ music, Elgar’s is richly romantic, often nostalgic and unashamedly tuneful. But with the intense exception of the Cello Concerto, there is little of VW’s darkness or strangeness or experiment in Elgar’s work. Which is why I guess I don’t like it half as much. Millions do, though, and the good burghers of the Malverns – or, as they call it, Elgar Country – know it well. If you’ve got him, flaunt him.

  The house in Great Malvern where he was born in 1856 was once called the Firs. Now it is the Birthplace Cottage. There are two museums. There’s a major festival so well established it has spawned its own fringe. There’s an Elgar motoring route – look for the violin signs – and any number of Elgar trails taking in significant, and sometimes pretty minor, landmarks in his life in the area. There’s a grand statue of him in the middle of Great Malvern. You can buy books on Elgar the Cyclist, celebrating his bike trips around the hills immortalised in Ken Russell’s fine black and white documentary from the 1960s. (Don’t worry, Elgar fans, it’s no Music Lovers and there’s no naked romping with Glenda Jackson.) This, in turn, has led to the development of Elgar bike trails and an Elgar charity bike ride. There is an Elgar housing association and an Elgar school of music in nearby Worcester and an Elgar foods limited, one of the region’s high flyers in the world of ‘cake, muffin and doughnut injectable fillings’.

  At the top of quaint Church Street, the Blue Bird tea rooms trades on the fact that Ed was a regular customer in the 1920s and 1930s and ‘would certai
nly still feel at home here in this quintessential English tea room’. There’s even an Elgar mature cheese, a concept some might find wryly apt. It adds a certain humour to the programme note for a performance of his Dream of Gerontius in Germany in 1908. ‘Edward Elgar – a man who has done his best work living quietly in the Malvern Hills, remote from commercial distraction and the strife of commercialism.’ And now his face gazes out at us from the back of the twenty-pound note.

  But the folks of the various Malverns (Link, Wells, Hills, Great) are right to be proud of him. He led the revival in British music during the early twentieth century and he remained fiercely loyal to his Middle England roots. I was speaking to Robert Plant once, singer with another local music legend, Led Zeppelin, and he described a certain piece of music as ‘Elgar on acid’. (Anyone who uses the phrase ‘on acid’ should, of course, be horsewhipped but, hey, this was Robert Plant.) ‘Are you an Elgar fan?’ I asked. Of course, he replied. ‘He was a Wolves supporter like me.’

  So he was. He’s believed to have gone to his first match in 1895 with Dora Penny, the teenage daughter of the rector of Wolverhampton, who later wrote about her first meeting with the composer: ‘I quickly found out that music was the last thing he wanted to talk about. I think we talked about football. He wanted to know if I ever saw the Wolverhampton Wanderers play and when he heard that our house was a stone’s throw from their ground he was quite excited.’

  In 1898, he was so taken with a phrase in a newspaper report, which said forward Billy Malpass had ‘banged the leather for goal’, that he set it to music. In other words, he created what is claimed to be the first football chant. These days, the team often emerge to the strains of Elgar and it’s even claimed that the Wolves diehards sometimes chant the ‘Enigma’ Variations, which seems implausible, although of course his ‘Pomp and Circumstance No 1’ (‘Land of Hope and Glory’) has often rung out from the terraces as ‘We hate Nottingham Forest’.

  Elgar was far, far from pomp or circumstance himself. He left school at fifteen with few qualifications, ran the aforementioned lunatic asylum band and struggled to make a living for most of his young manhood. He was a devout Catholic, which made him something of an outsider in established Middle English society. After an abortive attempt to establish himself in London with his wife, an ex-pupil, he came back to his beloved Malverns and took inspiration there for the rest of his life. He didn’t achieve real artistic and national recognition until in his forties. He skied, flew kites, betted on the horses and went on a 1,000-mile Amazon voyage in his sixties. He was fascinated and excited by technology, opened Abbey Rd studios and would have loved iPods and downloads. Cathy Sloan, curator of the Elgar Birthplace Museum, put it like this: ‘Elgar had such a wide range of enthusiasms and, far from being stuffy, he had a tremendous sense of fun. He also learned how to use his fame to his advantage by endorsing various products – in many ways he was the David Beckham of the early 20th century.’

  He wasn’t posh then. But he was Becks. And more than bikes, kites, cigars or Wolves, he loved the Malvern Hills. You can see them from pretty much any high vantage point in the Midlands. A three-pronged fin like the one on the back of a Stegosaurus, they run north to south for eight lovely undulating miles from Worcestershire to Herefordshire. For decades, they’ve been a playground for Brummies and Black Country folk of every hue and class, from hearty hikers and alcopopping youngsters to Tolkien and Auden, who both knew and loved these hills, Tolkien taking the Malverns as inspiration for the White Hills of Gondor.

  Auden taught in Colwall, just to the west of the ridge, where there’s a nice squat hotel that does brilliant things with the local beef and such. The snug fills up with locals and tourists and, the night I was there, the young Latino bar man disappeared upstairs after his shift and came down in the kind of outfit that Liberace might have regarded as showy. Details are scant – I should have written it down but it seemed unnecessarily anthropological in full view – but I seem to remember something alarmingly snug possibly in PVC and a studded denim cap. The locals, red-faced men drinking cider at the end of a hard day doing unspeakable things to pigs, I’ll wager, grunted and chuckled indulgently while Claudio waved his hands around, sipped his sticky drink and announced he was going into Birmingham ‘to find some fun’. I hope he was successful. I love how Middle England’s hotels are now entirely staffed by the hardworking young people of four or five continents, all bringing flamboyance, exotic accents and pale almond eyes to the snug bars and breakfast tables of the Shires.

  Near the southern end of the hills is the Herefordshire Beacon, or ‘British Camp’ as everyone calls it, after the ramparts and defensive ditches at its summit which date back to the Iron Age. The Briton in question was Caractacus who, according to legend, defended the fortress against the invading Roman army, inspiring Elgar to write his cantata ‘Caractacus’ after visiting his mother who was staying in Colwall. Looking across at the earthworks of British Camp, Ann Elgar said, ‘Can’t we write some tale about it?’ They did, with his neighbour A.C. Acworth writing some words and adding a spurious love interest and Elgar knocking off a rousing arrangement which savvily responded to the patriotic fervour of Victoria’s Silver Jubilee.

  You can get up to British Camp in fifteen minutes from the road, and everyone does, the grannies, the aunties, the backpackers, the kids, the dogs, the courting couples. For me, though, the pass below British Camp is a place of pilgrimage for reasons that are nothing to do with patriotism or antiquarian ramparts. Just by the car park is a wooden kiosk that has been there for many years and where, come rain or shine, a smiling Goth girl with multicoloured hair and woollies will sell you a polystyrene cup of steaming tea, a bacon sandwich and the best ice cream you will ever taste in your life. RachelHicks from a nearby farm in Ledbury makes ice cream that is so far removed from the tasteless ice blocks of the mass market or the unvarying homogenised scoops of even the luxury ones that it deserves a different name. It comes in luscious, drool-inducing flavours that reflect the country around it: gooseberry and elderflower, damson and sloe gin, brown bread, honeycomb, treacle toffee. On a hot summer’s day – if one should ever occur again in England – they transcend a mere ice cream and become a religious experience. Incredibly, you can get them mail order too, delivered overnight in a casket filled with dry ice. She advises you to open it wearing gloves. I’d be too impatient to find the gloves. And it’s worth losing a hand for anyway.

  Sit with your ice cream, then, up at the toposcope on the Worcestershire Beacon, the northern counterpart to the Worcestershire Beacon higher up the ridge, where it’s said that you can see sixteen counties and think of Elgar whizzing up and down the lanes and the bridlepaths with his head full of melodies. Look at the people thronging around here in their cagoules and tweeds and high heels, their Goretex and Primark and DKNY, kissing and strolling and throwing sticks for bounding dogs and then consider that this was the sight that inspired William Langland to write ‘I saw a fair field full of folk’, the opening line of Piers Plowman, one of the first masterpieces in English, written in the dialect of the Midlands. These fair fields full of folk, these sixteen counties, are not just full of song but teem with words. Tolkien and Auden wandered here, and all across these Shires words and music go together in a very English way. Local songwriter Clifford T. Ward wrote a bookish, heartbreaking love song called ‘Home Thoughts From Abroad’, which echoed Browning and asked, ‘How is Worcestershire? Is it still the same between us /Do I still occupy your mind?’ in a delicately, agonisingly English outpouring of thwarted love. When Pink Floyd were choosing a title for their first album, at a time when the rock world was celebrating its psychedelic head liberation with Trout Mask Replicas and Surrealistic Pillows, the Cambridge boys named their debut disc The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. It wasn’t a new variety of blotter acid but one of the chapters in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, a tale of moles and toads and ‘messing about in boats’.

  All things considered, it was t
ime to curl up with a good book.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ex Libris

  It is late in the evening and, like nearly everybody else in the world at this moment I guess, I am watching something on YouTube. In my case, it’s a clip that has been viewed roughly a quarter of a million times before. Now I grant you that that is nowhere near as many times as people have watched the video for Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’ or something called ‘The Evolution of Dance’ – it’s a bloke dancing – or ‘HaHaHa’, which is a Swedish baby laughing for an unutterably cutesy and tedious one minute and forty seconds while his doting dad makes a noise like a berk. But it is impressive given that all I’m watching is a bloke in an olden-days shirt mucking about in a pond.

  It’s possible that you don’t know what YouTube is but I bet you do. Jane Austen quite definitely wouldn’t have, though, since she died some 213 years before it was invented. In fact, Jane missed out on a whole lot of technical advances, such as cement, fridges and photography. When Jane was alive, cutting-edge technology was the miner’s safety lamp and the kaleidoscope. This then makes it all the more remarkable that in our world of MP3, wi-fi, sat nav and Blu-ray, JA should be CEO and MD of RomCom, and more popular than at any time since her death. The bloke in the pond I’m watching, by the way, is Colin Firth and his brooding, dampened Mr Darcy in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice is just one of the reasons why the gentle fever of Janemania is epidemic in the land, three centuries on from the premature death of his creator.