St. Lawrence Church in Broughton, Buckinghamshire – still splendid, in its way.

“Of course, you know this is going to make a stir when the word gets around?” he said. I nodded. “Is there anything anywhere else like it? In the same league?” No, I told him, there wasn’t. Once, yes. But no longer. Croughton, Stoke Orchard, St. Albans, Great Harrowden – they’d all been splendid in their day. But not now.”

Walk into an old village church in England today, and you are likely to be impressed by the austere serenity of limewashed white walls and sunlight streaming onto dark wooden pews.

The Weighing of Souls at Croughton.

This is not the vision our medieval forebears would have seen. In those earlier centuries, the walls were heavily decorated with painted images of heaven, hell, morality tales, and the lives of saints. Devils, angels, and a host of others competed for the churchgoers’ attention, amid ornate textiles, sculpted effigies on tombs, and stained glass.

A Month in the Country describes the labors of Tom Birkin to restore a fourteenth century wall painting of “The Last Judgment.” But he was hardly the only one to climb a ladder and tentatively chip away at layers of limewash. This aspect of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country is no fiction.

Take the recent celebration at St. Cadoc’s in Llancarfan, Wales (read about it here), a church founded around 1200 on the site of a seventh century monastery. The discovery of a thin red line at the top of a wall led to a team of experts visiting the church with discoveries and recommendations. Painstaking restoration in the last few years has revealed an stunning series of late fifteenth century paintings, including large and spectacular tableaux of St. George and the Dragon, as well as bold images of the seven deadly sins, a macabre death figure with worms and toads, and the family arms of some of the families who paid for the elaborate paintings. Continue reading →

Canadian soldiers survey a destroyed German bunker, November 1917.

Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell. Bodies split, heads blown off, groveling fear, shrieking fear, unspeakable fear! The world made mud! But I knew it was Bible hell she had in mind, hell that went on and on, an aching timeless hell. … We sloughed off the pals who’d gone down into death. While it was day that is. At night, in the dark, for a time they came back but we wanted no part of what they now were: theirs was another world—hell, if you care to call it that.

The dead and wounded…

It was famous not only for the scale of its casualties, but for the mud.

Officially known as the Third Battle of Ypres, the conflict, which began July 31, 1917, and ended on November 6, eventually left more than 600,000 casualties on both sides. Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, had long mulled the idea of launching a major offensive in Flanders, but he could not have anticipated the record rainfall, which liquefied the battlefield. The land soon became cratered, like the moon.

The drive for the tiny, already burnt-out Belgian village, which would offer little in the way of a prized capture, had already annihilated entire divisions of exhausted Britons, Australians, and New Zealanders. Morale plummeted as troops watched their comrades fall into giant craters in the earth and drown in the muddy water. It was the low point for the Allies, the strategy clouded in controversy, and its legacy one of futile death.

The use of mustard gas added a new horror to war, one that could incapacitate victims en masse. The Germans used it for the first time at Passchendaele. One nurse, Vera Brittain, wrote in her 1933 autobiography, Testament of Youth: “I wish those people who talk about going on with this war whatever it costs could see the soldiers suffering from mustard gas poisoning. Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke.” The trauma of gas was at least as great as shell shock. The fear of it overwhelmed the soldiers with dread.

Tom Birken and Charlie Moon often refer to Passchendaele quickly, furtively, as something not to be spoken of, a word to be dropped quickly and then move on. Or else the conversations happen “offstage”; Carr was perhaps unwilling to describe the carnage, which even photographs fail to capture. The battle, a counterpoint to the peace of Yorkshire, is more powerful for what remains unsaid.

Cratered, like the moon…

“I cannot attempt to describe the conditions under which we are fighting,” wrote soldier John Mortimer Wheeler, later a well-known archaeologist. “Anything I could write about them would seem an exaggeration but would, in reality, be miles below the truth. … The mud is not so much mud as a fathomless, sticky morass. The shell holes, where they do not actually merge into one another, are divided only by a few inches of this glutinous mud…. The gunners work thigh-deep in water.” Some British artillery pieces dug themselves so deeply into the mud with their recoils that they dropped below the surface; the crew would then put up a flag to mark the spot.” Continue reading →

When Booker prize-winning poet, essayist, and novelist Penelope Fitzgerald wrote the introduction to the Penguin edition of J.L. Carr‘s A Month in the Country, she cited Carr’s epigraph from The Harpole Report: “It is the death of the spirit we must fear.”

Then she explains what might be considered the unconventional author’s credo: “The death of the spirit is to lose confidence in one’s own independence and to do only what we are expected to do. At the same time, it is a mistake to expect anything specific from life. Life will not conform.”

It’s hard to imagine an author of more independent mind than Carr. Part of that stubbornness, certainly, was the refusal to bow to the passage of time – as evident is his fight to save St. Faith church in Yorkshire (read about that effort here). That was in life, but in his writing?  The magic is in how he turns time to his own fashioning. Fitzgerald writes:

‘And it’s gone. It’s gone. All the excitement and pride of that first job. Oxgodby, Kathy Ellerbeck, Alice Keach, Moon, that season of calm weather – gone as though they’d never been.’ Early in the book the perspective of time is established. Birkin is looking back, with wonder, at the very last years of a lamplit, horse-drawn age. Of course, he and Moon have another set of memories to haunt them, from Passchendaele. But Birkin believes that the future is opening up. ‘Well, I was young then.’

Carr is by no means a lavish writer, but he has the magic touch to re-enter the imagined past. Birkin notices, as he walks back down the road, how he first smelled, then saw, the swathes of hay lying in the dusk. At the Sunday school outing, ‘Afterwards, most of the men took off their jackets, exposing their braces and the tapes of their long woollen underpants, and astonished their children by larking around like great lads.’ Those tapes! Who would have remembered them except Jim Carr?

From the first Birkin has seen that the wall-painting is a Doom, a Christ in Judgement with its saved and its sinners in a great spread of reds and blues. He finishes the restoration according to contract, just as the first breath of autumn comes to Oxgodby. But the moment when the year crosses into another season becomes indistinguishable from his passion, making itself clear as it does quite suddenly, for Alice Keach.

‘All this happened so long ago.’ The tone of A Month in the Country, however, isn’t one of straightforward remembering or (if there can be such a thing) of straightforward nostalgia, or even an acute sense of the loss of youth. More complex is his state of mind when he thinks of the people – perhaps only a few – who will visit Oxgodby church in its meadows and regret that they missed seeing the master painter himself – ‘as one might come to Malvern, bland Malvern, and think that Edward Elgar walked this way to give music lessons’. This is a nostalgia for something we have never had, ‘a precious tugging of the heart – knowing a precious moment gone and we not there’. But even this has to be distinguished from downright pain. ‘We can ask and ask, but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever.’ You can only wait, Carr says, for the pain to pass, but what is it that once seemed ours for ever? Or is this, like the Shropshire Lad’s, an unanswerable question?

Read the whole introduction here.

We talked about apples. It seemed that her father had been a great apple man. In Hampshire, they’d had a fair-sized orchard planted with a wide variety and he’d brought her up to discriminate between them. “Before he pit into one, he’d sniff it, roll it around his cupped palms, then smell his hands. Then he’d tap it and finger it like a blind man. Sometimes he made me close my eyes and, when I’d had a bite, ask me to say which apple.”

J.L. Carr would have been aware of the invasion of foreign apples, which was beginning about the time he wrote A Month in the Country. The familiar English varieties that were seasonal were steadily giving way to year-round commercial brands. Alice Keach’s speech is an ode to the traditional English apple, a cause no doubt dear to the author who has been called “the last Englishman.”

Tom Birkin mentions an “obvious” British apple, Cox’s Orange. This particular orange reigned as the premier dessert apple of England for almost two centuries, from the time when Richard Cox, a retired brewer who moved to the Berkshire countryside, pollinated two seeds from a Ribston Pippin and a Blenheim Orange apple.

Alice Keach was right when she said the Orange Cox was an easy apple to distinguish – even a blind man with a bad cold could do it, for the apple’s seeds are loose and and rattle within the core when you shake the apple. One enthusiast described it as ““a variety for the connoisseur, who can delight in the appreciation of the remarkable range of subtle flavors — pear, melon, freshly-squeezed Florida orange juice, and mango are all evident in a good example.” These apples are described like fine wines.

One English journalist, discussing the Cox Orange, decried the invasion of foreign apples this way:

But now, 184 years later, the empress of all apples is under threat of being ousted from her throne by vulgar – and literally more tasteless – rivals such as Gala, Jazz and Braeburn. Year-round sales of Gala have – I can hardly bring myself to write this – already overtaken the Cox, and UK production is following the same sorry trend.

One reason – wouldn’t you know, in our instant, takeaway society – is that these impostors look better, rather as Paris Hilton looks better than, say, Grace Kelly. The true Cox can be unevenly sized and slightly dusty-looking. Apparently, with apples, as with life, appearance is now all.

Apple-eaters are being seduced by the shiny red skins of foreign rivals. Not long ago I was appalled by the sight of those even more vulgar arrivistes, Pink Ladies, being sold in our local supermarket in a free fluorescent Barbie-pink plastic holdall. Continue reading →