Et in arcadia ego

I was born in Highgate, a district of London that is famous for its cemetery, in which Karl Marx is buried. My first home was in Richmond Crescent, London North 1, in an elegant four-storey townhouse. Nowadays such properties are worth millions: indeed, many years later the Prime Minister bought the house next door. However, in the post-War depression of the early 1950s they were worth next to nothing. Nobody wanted to live in run-down old accommodation, however elegant it had once been. Everyone wanted to be part of the bright, modern future that it was assumed would soon blossom as reconstruction came trailing prosperity and growth in its wake.
Before I was two years old, we moved to Stevenage, the first of the post-War new towns, and there we stayed for 17 years. So I suppose I was a child of urban design. And Stevenage was designed so rigorously that, many years later when I did some research to see whether Walter Christaller's theory of hexagonal urban growth worked there, it fitted so precisely that the town could only have been designed on the basis of Christaller's principles.
Nowadays, Stevenage is a social disaster, a magnet for urban pathologies and a town that boasts an abnormally high proportion of unmarried teenage mothers. Forty-five kilometres north of London it is simply too close to the metropolis to be independent, and so it has grown in population as it has stagnated in functionality. Nor was it easy to adapt a rigorous urban design intended for people who used public transport and had no cars to life in the new millennium, in which people drive by preference nearly everywhere they go.
But in the 1960s, as I remember it best, Stevenage was a different place, modern, functional and liveable. In part, my lack of familiarity with other environments made it seem better than it was, but it was also better than it is, for the rising tide of urban blight had yet to overwhelm it. Nineteen-sixties buildings that would later look tawdry and uninspired then simply looked new.
When I was old enough to go around on my own I went to concerts at the local College of Further Education, which was nicknamed the 'College of Knowledge'--rather sardonically, in fact, because it was generally agreed that knowledge was the last thing one was likely to acquire there. But the concerts were good and the atmosphere intimate and friendly. Drugs may have been present (I never ever took them), but they had not assumed the pervasiveness and menace that they were later to acquire. I shall always remember the day when I was 17 and my driving instructor turned up in an unfamiliar car, looking shaken. His previous pupil had driven very fast into the College of Knowledge, but not through the main entrance: instead she went across the ditch and through the brick wall into the grounds.
First I attended a school named after a pear-tree, and then one that sported the name of Alfred Nobel, the man who supplied dynamite to the belligerents in the First World War. Both were surrounded by lush playing fields, vast expanses of green that later would be turned into high-density housing estates, but years after I had left. I missed the fortieth anniversary reunion of my class, which is a pity, although I was at a meeting in the National Assembly of France, no less, and hence could not go. I am told Evelyn Spencer was there, thirty-three years older than I remember her but essentially unchanged. As a teenager I had a most ambiguous friendship with her. The fascination that some women possess is derived from a mystique that they cultivate and carry around with them as if it were a delicate, gauzy scarf or an exclusive perfume. Paradoxically, in Evelyn Spencer's case, it was a slight air of vulgarity, but it certainly added to her allure. When she laughed she did so impetuously, and her voluptuous and well-formed bust trembled in a way that I found absolutely mesmerising (I am told she still does it). I recall that she kissed with a similar impetuousness and a salivary wetness that reminded me of a being nuzzled by a dog.
The real advantage of living in Stevenage New Town was the fact that in the 1960s it still had a strong air of urbs in rure: in some locales it so strong that it was really rus in urbe. For example, across the road from my home in Valley Way there was a large cornfield, where we children could roll around amid the stalks of grain, hunt for small animals and birds' nests in the hedgerows and catch freshwater shrimp in brooklets. Or we could go into nearby Monks Wood and tramp around in the deep shade of the trees, rock the sapling until they broke (we were destructive, as children are) or search for moles' burrows. Once a friend of mine captured a mole: he held it on his hand, small, velvety, half-blind and quaking with fear. There were always new experiences in the cornfield. Another time it was a baby sparrow that had fallen out of the nest. We took it to the house of an old lady we knew and she fed it milk from a glass pipette and bedded it down in cotton wool. But during the night her cat made a meal of it: we children were heartbroken when we found out.
At school at sixteen years of age I began to specialise in geography, history and English literature. I became interested in Romanticism and soon discovered that I was living in the thick of it, providing I ventured out a short distance away from the serried ranks of houses in the New Town. For instance, I could easily walk down to Roebuck on the fringes of Stevenage and out into the countryside along the narrow, leafy roads that led to Knebworth. Knebworth House, former home of the novelist Bulwer-Lytton, was an ancient country villa that had been transformed into a Gothic castle in the nineteenth century by the addition of much grotesque heraldry. It was surrounded by an immense park which had been left to go to seed. This had once been landscaped with outdoor statuary, grand staircases, ornamental lakes and picturesque mock-ruins, as well as avenues of elm trees and immemorial oaks standing alone in lush paddocks. All of this was slowly being reclaimed by nature. But the Lyttons had left the gates open so that local people could roam around freely(eventually they shut and padlocked them and transformed the grounds into a theme park and a venue for enormous rock concerts, but that was some years later). It was a glorious sensation to roam amid the Grecian maidens, whose naked Coade-stone bodies were slowly being clothed with lichen and fungus; to collect shiny, mahogany-brown horse chestnuts from underneath the broad green canopies of the trees they fell from so copiously; to walk up a broad strip of turf between a double line of ancient elms, as yet untouched by Dutch elm disease, to the house at the top.
Next to Knebworth House was the Lytton family church, dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul, which was a fourteenth century building of great charm and discretion. For some years, until it was eventually whitewashed out of existence, a large russet scrawl in a classic eighteenth century hand adorned the inside wall of the porch. This hoary, indecipherable graffito was wreathed in mystery. It looked like something out of a historical manuscript, written with a flourish and a gigantic quill pen.
Inside the church there was a large, square mediaeval tower with a painted signboard which recorded that many decades previously a group of bellringers had succeeded in ringing 5040 changes without pausing (a change is a peal of, in this case, eight bells that ring different notes on a scale, a process that requires eight strong ringers to pull the ropes in a constantly changing sequence which needs much concentration and co-ordination). The inside of the building was illuminated by light filtered through trees and Victorian painted glass of indifferent quality but considerable charm, such that the pews were constantly bathed in an evanescent dapple of red, indigo, gold and silver, often taking the form of the spread wings of the angels that appeared in each window. Moreover, as it was far from any roads and houses, and generally unvisited, the church conserved an air of absolute peace, which seemed to connect it to all the six centuries of its existence. This was somewhat unnerving if one ventured into the private chapel of the Lyttons, and their predecessors, the Strodes, for it was crammed full of life-size effigies of the local squires executed by the Dutch sculptor Jacob Ruijsbrach in the late 1700s in pure, white Carrara marble. On dull winter afternoons this display of eighteenth-century ostentation looked decidedly ghostly, especially the bulging eyeballs of the bewigged gentlemen who posed astride the caskets in which the last remains of their namesakes were conserved.
Camden, the great sixteenth century topographer, opined that the countryside of Hertfordshire is the most subtle and alluring of Great Britain. I do not know what has happened to it in this age of mass communication, universal mobility and immense pressure to develop anything undeveloped, but when I was young large tracts of it were much as he saw it four and a half centuries previously. It had a romantic charm that I have never seen reproduced anywhere else. It was an unforgettably moving experience to walk down the lanes that skirt Cassiobury Park at dawn on a bright, fresh day, as the birds filled the air with their chorus, dew dripped from the leaves of the trees, the gathering light turned the landscape an intense green and the mist rose slowly from the grass and swirled around the sentinel oak trees.
One of my favourite places was also one of the most secluded: the chantry chapel at Minsden. It required specialised knowledge to find this ancient pile of masonry, which lay hidden in the undergrowth deep in a wood surrounded by ploughed fields. Built in the 1300s it had gradually fallen into disuse and become quite ruined. It was reputed to have a ghost, and indeed in Hitchin public library a book of local history contains what purported to be a photograph of this phantasm, a shadowy figure in a monk's robe and cowl, although it was an obvious photo-montage. But there was no denying that Minsden had an atmosphere. In fact it was a favourite place for Satanic rites and animal sacrifice, all of which was assiduously reported in the Hitchin Gazette in a suitably tut-tut tone. A local historian had had himself buried in the middle of the chapel and someone had smashed his tombstone to fragments and made an unsuccessful attempt to exhume the body. And it all added to the air of mystery of the place, which was just what the soul of a seventeen-year-old student of Romanticism craved.
It was in this setting that I first fell seriously in love. I had noticed her in a chemistry lesson (how appropriate!) at school: red hair, a pretty face with a slightly quizzical expression, a prosperous figure that developed early (she was then thirteen and embarrassed at the visible signs of her how maturity). A week before my sixteenth birthday she invited me to go with her to Ashwell, a Hertfordshire village, where on Saturday mornings she worked as an artist's assistant. Love blossomed in the cellar where the artist made pottery and painted her canvasses. Later, we walked hand-in-hand down the spacious aisle of Ashwell parish church, a massive building of great age and beauty. In fact Ashwell had been a wealthy village that made its money from sheep farming and the wool trade until, in 1349, it was decimated by the Black Plague. In a sense it did not recover until the local railway line to London was electrified in 1970 and commuting to London suddenly became easy. So for 620 years Ashwell bore the scars of the Plague: empty spaces where mediaeval houses had fallen down and not been replaced, an air of silence and vacancy. Most spectacular was a graffito scratched into the soft chalk walls of the nave of the church, a picture of old St Paul's Cathedral in London (the building that was destroyed by fire in 1666) and a Latin inscription that recorded that the plague killed most of the inhabitants of Ashwell one by one until the furious winds of St Maur's Day 1349 blew away its miasmas: "the dregs of the mob alone survive", it said.
My girlfriend lived in the village of Graveley, on the Hitchin side of Stevenage situated astride the old Watling Street, the ramrod-straight Roman road, whose trace could be detected forging across the gently rolling farmland of outer Hertfordshire. She was the daughter of the village schoolteacher, an elderly widow. For me it was a revelation to meet people who lived so near to a metropolis but were so rural in their speech and attitudes. My girlfriend and I spent much time in her room discovering what love is about. For a long time it scared us, as we were entirely unprepared to deal with the violence of our own emotions. One consequence of all that was a series of pregnancy scares--missed periods, deep anxiety, frantic praying, talk of folk remedies; but in the end fortunately no babies. It did lead us into deep trouble, blackmail even, when the local Family Planning Centre breached its own rules of confidentiality and spread the word around that we were using its services.
We assumed we would spend the rest of our lives together, and indeed we made an attempt to do so. But what worked very well at sixteen and seventeen became increasingly burdensome ten years later. It all ended in lies, deceit, recrimination, violence and vindictive legal action. That was when I discovered that emotional hurt is every bit as profound as the worst physical pain. It drove me to Italy, where I began to acquire that levity, that protective carapace, that we all need in order to survive our relationships. Living with the red-haired girl from Graveley had simply stopped me from growing up. When she and I had parted it happened in a rush.
I recently went back to Stevenage for the first time in more than three decades. I needed a reason, as I had no intention of going there simply to look at the place. In June 2006 there was a civil protection conference in the town centre and I came across from Italy to go to it. I knew what to expect as I had gleaned information and opinions on Stevenage from the Internet. It was much as I expected it to be. The town centre, which as a very small child I had seen officially opened by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, had a seedy, run-down appearance. Much had changed in 30 years, of course, but there were still corners and vistas that stimulated some long-dormant memory in the deepest recesses of my mind. We should neither glorify nor ignore our own histories. But we have to come to terms with our memories, and if they are very powerful or suggestive that is sometimes very difficult.
four o'clock on a winter's day
when the houses are grey
and the ice-cream vendor's tinkling chimes
spin their inane rhymes
into the crisp, cold air:
yes, i was there.
the sky was heavy with leaden clouds,
the season spoke aloud
un the voice of the frost, white
in the glimmering light
and the gathering dusk, alone
and in groups the children came home
from school and the night crept on
invading the streets where the light had shone
from the dying day's brittle eyes;
in the weak moon-rise
the cold streets slept.
i remember well
the thoughts i kept.
[Recollection of a dusk on a weekday evening in
Stevenage in November 1963, written circa 1970.]