Work, play and creativity: Another column for the JCPCP

This is another of the quarterly 'Sighcology' columns I contribute to the  Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Work, play and creativity

An overexcited website selling business courses tells us:

It’s easy to play it safe. To follow the rules and optimise what already exists. In a world of constant change, sensible can feel smart. Until it stops working. You see, logic will get you to the starting line – but only creativity will win you the race.

 That's why we believe creativity is the most valuable capability for growth. And it’s something that you can learn, practise and embed in every area of life. 

And another devoted to resources for creativity says:

We learn when we play as children, in fact this accounts for most of our early learning. Play acts as a learning laboratory for trying out different internal models on an external world. This is not dissimilar to our traditional brainstorming sessions.

Does this mean that we can all regress into childhood and that making mistakes or behaving foolishly does not matter? Of course not. What we mean in this context is that a certain degree of chaos, learning from mistakes and not playing by the rules is acceptable.

The link between creativity and childhood play in adulthood has indeed been studied by psychologists, with Sandra Russ publishing a book confidently titled Pretend Play in Childhood: Foundation of Adult Creativity. But I wonder if children’s play is as anarchic as the business world makes it sound?

There are philosophers who saw play differently. Michel de Montaigne wrote that “it should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.” Nietzsche agreed, saying man’s maturity is “to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play”.

And if you don’t trust philosophy, listen to the young protagonists of Richard Jefferies’ Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which appeared in 1882 as a three-volume adult novel but was later repurposed as a children’s classic. The two boys explore the farms and reservoir around their homes with heads full of adventure stories, and everything they see or do has to be reimagined in the light of them. They even have to reimagine themselves:

“We ought to be something,” said Mark discontentedly.

“Of course we ought,” said Bevis. “Things are very stupid unless you are something.”

*****

W.H. Auden displayed a map of Alston Moor in the study of his home on Fire Island, near New York. The landscape of decaying lead mines it pictured had haunted his early poetry, and before that his childhood imaginings. Between the ages of six and twelve, he recalled, he devoted much of his waking thought to “the construction and elaboration of a private sacred world, the basic elements of which were a landscape, northern and limestone, and an industry, lead mining”.

There were, however, rules. His was a Meccano world, not a Minecraft one:

I decided, or rather, without conscious decision, I instinctively felt that I must impose two restrictions upon my freedom of fantasy. In choosing what objects were to be included, I was free to select this and reject that, on condition that both were real objects in the primary world, to choose, for example, between two kinds of water turbine ... I was not allowed to invent one.

He was faced with just such a choice between machines:

One type I found more sacred or “beautiful”, but the other type was, as I knew from my reading, the more efficient. At this point I realised that it was my moral duty to sacrifice my aesthetic preference to reality or truth.

The child was father to the poet, because you can see the same morality at work in Auden’s growing dissatisfaction with one of his most celebrated poems, “September 1, 1939”. He omitted two stanzas from its first publication and became increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion that “We must love one another or die.” 

"Between you and me,” he wrote to a critic in 1957, “I loathe that poem.” He found it too flattering both to him and to his readers, and changed its final line in later printings to “We must love one another and die,” but mostly he refused permission for it to appear at all.

******

So maybe children’s play is not the free-for-all its enthusiasts in the world of business courses assume but has rules that adults are too busy or sentimental to notice. And maybe they have got creativity wrong too.

The classic way of measuring creativity is the Alternative Uses Test which presents the subject with a simple object – a brick is a favourite choice – and asks them to think of as many uses for it as possible in a set time. But this seems a limited view of what creativity consists in. Isn’t it more social than that? As far as brainstorming works in business – and there seems a consensus that it’s not far at all – it’s not because someone in the room says something brilliant: it works because they say something silly, someone else turns it on its head and a third person realises that there might be something useful here.

Solitariness can be the enemy of creativity. In the days when my political party published a weekly newspaper, I would often find myself at our annual conference and being asked to write a column for it in a couple of hours, only to find that I didn’t have an idea in my head. The secret was not to sit there and think harder: it was to get away from the screen for half an hour and go for a wander around the trade stands and the stalls run by party groups. 

I would have a chat with someone, pick up a piece of gossip from an old friend and a handful of leaflets about good causes. I might end up using little of what I had gleaned, but when I got back to the newspaper’s office the gears were whirring again and the column wrote itself.

Hodge and his Masters and The Choirmaster's Burial

Looking again at Gillian Avery's Victorian People, I find she quotes one of this blog's heroes:

Richard Jefferies in Hodge and his Masters spoke of some of the changes that had come about with an energetic new vicar. His predecessor had been a man of whom it was said, "he was a very good sort of man: he never interfered with anybody or anything," 

The new vicar introduced a choir, doing away with the old motley collection of village instrumentalists. He brought colours into the hangings and decoration of the church, and put flowers and candlesticks on the altar. He held early morning celebrations of communion, he left the church open all day for private prayer. He reminded the people of Lent and Easter, festivals and saints' days, and emphasised the importance of the communion service. He saw to it that the district was visited, that no cottage was left neglected. 

All this was an immense change from the days when gentry dozed peacefully in high boxes-in pews while the preacher in black gown and white bands thumped the red velvet cushion in his pulpit during the lengthy course of his forty-minute sermon, which with the Litany and the Psalms formed the main part of Sunday worship.

I'm left wondering how much of an influence Jefferies was on Thomas Hardy, because here we are very much in the world of Hardy's poem The Choirmaster's Burial - an earnest, reforming new clergyman sweeps away the old ways.

You can read the poem on Hello Poetry and listen Benjamin Britten's setting of it below.

The Joy of Six 1522

"Why, if the homes are unregistered and therefore illegal, are English councils still placing children in them? And how can the system be reformed so this doesn't continue to happen?" Noel Titheradge investigates a continuing scandal.

James Meek looked at housing in Andy Burnham's Manchester om the eve of the last general election: "Burnham presides over a scale model of a future Starmer Britain, one where a social democratic leader full of genuine desire to mend the broken, over-marketised public realm is hamstrung by lack of resources and constrained by fear of frightening away the wealth-holders. Like England, Greater Manchester has its richer south, the Cheshire fringes where the golfing set and superstar footballers live, its great main city of hedonism and cranes and sky-high rents, and its decapitalised, struggling northern towns."

Rachel Dixon on the revival of the River Mease (rises in Leicestershire, flows through Derbyshire and joins the Trent in Staffordshire) by the communities on its banks.

"Old buildings give places a uniqueness that cannot be imported, exported, or copied. They contain distinctive details and period-specific materials that carry forward long-standing building traditions and preserve something intangible at first glance – the touch of time." Anita Straub makes the case for conserving historic buildings.

Daniel A. Kaufman distinguishes the 13 different social media personalities.

"The falling-off of the last few chapters is due to the need to fill the three-decker’s third volume, but that must surely be forgiven when Bevis and Mark and Frances make their winter ride through the ice-floes of The New Sea in the final stunning paragraphs." Brian Alderson pays tribute to Bevis: The Story of a Boy by Richard Jefferies.

W.H. Auden wrote a sonnet about Richard Jefferies

I was reading Nicholas Jenkins's The Island: W. H. Auden and the Last of Englishness – or scanning for a column I'm writing, if I'm honest – when I came across a reference to a sonnet by Auden on Richard Jefferies.

It turns out to have been written when the poet was 18 years old and to be included in the collection W. H. Auden. Juvenilia: Poems 1922–28. It also seems that the young Auden's chief acquaintance with Jefferies' work came via the biography of him by Edward Thomas.

I can't find the whole sonnet online, but here is an extract:

What more? When dying he could praise the light
And watch larks trembling over fields of corn
Until the whole sky sang, with eyes as bright
As kestrel perched upon the splintered oak,
A sentinel, dark, motionless, at dawn.

Richard Jefferies Museum plans new Centre for Arts and Wildlife

The Richard Jefferies Museum, which is housed in the writer's birthplace at Coate Farm, Swindon, is raising money to fund its plans for a new Centre for Arts and Wildlife. You can read all about those plans on the museum website.

A spokesperson for the trust that runs the museum told the Swindon Advertiser:

"Our little museum has been growing – more events, more activities, more volunteers and more visitors.

"But we think it is time to grow some more, by creating something that will help the old farm site accommodate everything that's going on.

"So, we have come up with an idea for a new building to honour the things that were important to Jefferies, and are important to us."

You can read more about Richard Jefferies and his importance as a writer and thinker on the museum website.

Back in the Nineties I wrote my MA dissertation about Jefferies and gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture. The lecture took place in the church hall at Aldbourne in Wiltshire – the village where the classic Doctor Who story The Dæmons was filmed in 1971.

Richard Jefferies: If we had never before looked upon the earth

During Covid lockdown in 2020, the actor Simon Russell Beale, who lives in the town, recorded some readings from the work of my man Richard Jefferies for the Marlborough Literary Festival. You can still find them on the festival's website.

The extract below is from one of those readings. It's taken from Jefferies' essay Wild Flowers, which is included in his collection The Open Air, published in 1885.

If we had never before looked upon the earth, but suddenly came to it man or woman grown, set down in the midst of a summer mead, would it not seem to us a radiant vision? The hues, the shapes, the song and life of birds, above all the sunlight, the breath of heaven, resting on it; the mind would be filled with its glory, unable to grasp it, hardly believing that such things could be mere matter and no more. Like a dream of some spirit-land it would appear, scarce fit to be touched lest it should fall to pieces, too beautiful to be long watched lest it should fade away. 

So it seemed to me as a boy, sweet and new like this each morning; and even now, after the years that have passed, and the lines they have worn in the forehead, the summer mead shines as bright and fresh as when my foot first touched the grass. It has another meaning now; the sunshine and the flowers speak differently, for a heart that has once known sorrow reads behind the page, and sees sadness in joy. But the freshness is still there, the dew washes the colours before dawn. Unconscious happiness in finding wild flowers—unconscious and unquestioning, and therefore unbounded. 

I used to stand by the mower and follow the scythe sweeping down thousands of the broad-flowered daisies, the knotted knapweeds, the blue scabious, the yellow rattles, sweeping so close and true that nothing escaped; and, yet although I had seen so many hundreds of each, although I had lifted armfuls day after day, still they were fresh. They never lost their newness, and even now each time I gather a wild flower it feels a new thing. 

The greenfinches came to the fallen swathe so near to us they seemed to have no fear; but I remember the yellowhammers most, whose colour, like that of the wild flowers and the sky, has never faded from my memory. The greenfinches sank into the fallen swathe, the loose grass gave under their weight and let them bathe in flowers.

Thank you. I needed that. 

XTC: Love on a Farmboy's Wages

Do I detect the influence of another son of Swindon, Richard Jefferies, here?

And did anything come of this proposal?

An idea has been put forward by Barry Andrews, of Swindon-grown band XTC, to create an installation which, through sound, music and large computer-generated moving images, evokes the atmosphere of Jefferies' post-apocalyptic book, After London.

Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies on steam threshing machines

Having blogged about the explosion that killed four men at Stonton Wyville, and then about the dangers posed by the boilers that powered steam threshing machines, I thought I would see how two masters of 19th-century rural literature wrote about these machines.

Here's Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d'Urbevilles:

Close under the eaves of the stack, and as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of their muscles and nerves.

A little way off there was another indistinct figure; this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot, explained without the necessity of much daylight that here was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the engine-man. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to amaze and to discompose its aborigines.

What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world, but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the service of his Plutonic master. The long strap which ran from the driving-wheel of his engine to the red thresher under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and him.

And here's Richard Jefferies in his essay The Countryside: Sussex:

To-day the sparrows are just as busy as ever of old, chatter, chirp around the old barn, while the threshing machine hums, and every now and then lowers its voice in a long-drawn descending groan of seemingly deep agony. 

Up it rises again as the sheaves are cast in—hum, hum, hum; the note rises and resounds and fills the yard up to the roof of the barn and the highest tops of the ricks as a flood fills a pool, and overflowing, rushes abroad over the fields, past the red hop-oast, past the copse of yellowing larches, onwards to the hills. An inarticulate music—a chant telling of the sunlit hours that have gone and the shadows that floated under the clouds over the beautiful wheat. No more shall the tall stems wave in the wind or listen to the bees seeking the clover-fields. The lark that sang above the green corn, the partridge that sheltered among the yellow stalks, the list of living things delighting in it—all have departed. The joyous life of the wheat is ended—not in vain, for now the grain becomes the life of man, and in that object yet more glorified. 

Outwards the chant extending, reaches the hollows of the valley, rolling over the shortened stubble, where the plough already begins the first verse of a new time. A pleasant sound to listen to, the hum of the threshing, the beating of the engine, the rustle of the straw, the shuffle shuffle of the machine, the voices of the men, the occupation and bustle in the autumn afternoon! 

I listened to it sitting in the hop-oast, whose tower, like a castle turret, overlooks and domineers the yard. In the loft the resounding hum whirled around, beating and rebounding from the walls, and forcing its way out again through the narrow window. The edge, as it were, of a sunbeam lit up the rude chamber crossed with unhewn beams and roofed above with unconcealed tiles, whose fastening pegs were visible. A great heap of golden scales lay in one corner, the hops fresh from the drying. 

Up to his waist in a pocket let through the floor a huge giant of a man trod the hops down in the sack, turning round and round, and now his wide shoulders and now his red cheeks succeeded. The music twirled him about as a leaf by the wind. Without the rich blue autumn sky; within the fragrant odour of hops, the hum of the threshing circling round like the buzz of an immense bee. As the hum of insects high in the atmosphere of midsummer suits and fits to the roses and the full green meads, so the hum of the threshing suits to the yellowing leaf and drowsy air of autumn. The iteration of hum and monotone soothes, and means so much more in its inarticulation than the adjusted chords and tune of written music. 

Laughing, the children romped round the ricks; they love the threshing and flock to it, they watch the fly-wheel rotating, they look in at the furnace door when the engine-driver stokes his fire, they gaze wonderingly at the gauge, and long to turn the brass taps; then with a shout they rush to chase the unhappy mice dislodged from the corn.

This last paragraph is typical of Jefferies' ability to surprise you with an unexpected observation. And I note that he has accepted the steam threshing machine into the agricultural world, whereas to Hardy they remain something entirely alien.

The Victorian age and the 1950s both took place in colour

Embed from Getty Images

One of the best things about subscribing to the London Review of Books is that it grants you access to the magazine's archives. So it was that I was reading a book review by Jonathan Meades from 2018.

I've not read the book he is discussing – The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain by Lynda Nead – a lot of caveats apply to this post. And I'm pleased to see it has a photograph of St Saviour's Road, Leicester, on its dust wrapper. It's the same photo you see above.

Meades writes:

In The Tiger in the Smoke, fog and smog are ubiquitous. They are past and present, a continuum from the High Victorian age to the New Elizabethan age, which was also, according to Nead, the first neo-Victorian age. They possess a palette that is specific to them­.... The 'characteristic colour' she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown.

He questions whether this is an adequate account of Victorian Britain, suspecting that Nead has been too influenced by Dickens and his fog, when in reality:

He lived in an age of polychromatic brickwork, dazzlingly bright inflammable crinolines, gilded smoking rooms, saturated ottomans, luminous painting, garish advertisement hoardings and the Great Exhibition. Its gaudy vulgarity appalled such aesthetes as William Morris and, retrospectively, Nikolaus Pevsner, who wrote of Victorian manufacture’s 'rank growth'.

And I am going to question the book's account of the post-war era, at least as it is seen in this snippet on audience reaction to David Lean's Great Expectations that Meades quotes:

'What,' she wonders, 'did this fabulous cinematography mean to postwar audiences and how did it relate to the greyscale aesthetics of the fog and the bombsites?'

But bombsites weren't grey. Here's J.K. Adams writing the Guardian's Country Diary for 1 September 1948:

A gentle breeze was blowing as I walked through the badly bombed Cripplegate area of London the other day, and the feathery seeds of the rosebay willowherb were drifting before it like snowflakes. In the basements of what seven or eight years ago were shops, warehouses, and dwellings a waist-high tangle of willowherb, spear-plume thistle, and Oxford ragwort bore witness to the thoroughness with which nature reclaims the land as soon as man’s back is turned. More than that, here and there were birches and elders and various sorts of willow that had grown to a height that fully entitled them to be called trees.

It may have been a far cry to the complete return to nature envisaged by Richard Jefferies in After London, but the germ of that great reversion, one felt, was there. Even the birds have begun to return to this as to other parts of London that have gone wild. Within the past two years a linnet and both pied and grey wagtails have been seen there, and at migration time in 1946 three birds on passage looked in – a whitethroat, a wheatear, and a whinchat. Even more remarkable was the visit paid by a little owl during the autumn of that year.

Or to make it sound more exotic, here is Lucy Scholes writing about Rose Macaulay's The World My Wilderness:

Later, in London, they escape their homes and their guardians, hiding from the police in the blitzed ruins of Cheapside. This uninhabited no-man’s-land is "a wilderness of little streets, caves and cellars, the foundations of a wrecked merchant city, grown over by green and golden fennel and ragwort, coltsfoot, purple loosestrife, rosebay willow herb, bracken, bramble and tall nettles, among which rabbits burrowed and wild cats crept and hens laid eggs."

I suspect London bombsites became less exotic as they were gradually cleared for redevelopment, but I still think of them as a home to lush vegetation and providing unexpected new vistas of Italianate churches.

Let's finish by going back to Victorian polychromatic brickwork. Here's something else I've found recently - a charity-shop copy of Nairn's London. In it, Ian Nairn writes of All Saints, Margaret Street:

To describe a church as an orgasm is bound to offend someone; yet this building can only be understood in terms of compelling, overwhelming passion. 

I'm not sure that it advances my argument, but I really want to quote it.

Lord of the Flies: Had William Golding read Richard Jefferies?

Accounts of the writing of William Golding's Lord of the Flies tend to emphasise the influence of R.M Ballantyne's The Coral Island on the book. Golding both borrowed Ballantyne's plot and subverted his view of the world.

But I have lately come to wonder if Golding had read another Victorian novel: Richard Jefferies' Bevis: The Story of a Boy. Because, in it, Bevis and his friend Mark maroon themselves on an island and live like explorers. Gradually, like the boys in Lord of the Flies, they become convinced they are sharing the island with a beast.

Bevis and Mark were better organised than Golding's boys:

Poles were nailed across the open sides from upright to upright, not more than six inches asunder right up to the beam on two sides. This allowed plenty of space to shoot through, but nothing of any size could spring in. On the third, the poles were nailed across up to three feet high, and the rest prepared and left ready to be lashed in position with cords the last thing at night.

When these were put up there would be a complete cage from within which they could fire or shoot arrows, and be safe from the spring of the beast. Lastly, they went up on the cliff to see what could be done there. The sand was very hard, so that to drive in stakes the whole length of the cliff edge would have taken a day, if not two days.

They decided to put up some just above the hut so as to prevent the creature leaping on to the roof, and perhaps tearing a way through it. Bevis held the matchlock this time and watched while Mark hewed out the stakes, taking the labour and the watching in turn. With much trouble, these were driven home and sharpened nails put at the top, so that the beast approaching from behind would have to leap over these before descending the perpendicular cliff on to the hut. The fortification was now complete, and they sat down to think if there was anything else.

That's from chapter 45 of the classic Jonathan Cape edition of Bevis, which has illustrations by E.H. Shepard. 

But it was originally chapter 11 of volume 3 - a reminder that, though the book puts a child's perceptions at its centre in a way that was unprecedented in 1882, it was published as a novel for adults and in a form to suit commercial libraries.

Anyway, there's more about the beast in the next chapter:

At the water’s edge some flags were bent, and then the tall grass, as high as their chests, was thrust aside, forming a path which had evidently been frequently trodden. There was now no longer the least doubt that the creature, whatever it was, was of large size, and as the trail was so distinct the thought occurred to them both at once that perhaps it had been used by more than one. From the raft they could see along it five or six yards, then it turned to avoid an alder. While they stood looking Pan came back, he had run right through and returned, so that there was nothing in the reed-bed at present.

Bevis stepped over the bulwark into the trail with the matchlock; Mark picked up the axe and followed. As they walked their elbows touched the grass each side, which showed that the creature was rather high than broad, lean like the whole feline tribe, long, lean, and stealthy. The reed-grass had flowered and would soon begin to stiffen and rustle dry under the winds. By the alder a bryony vine that had grown there was broken and had withered, it had been snapped long since by the creature pushing through.

The trail turned to the right, then to the left round a willow stole, and just there Pan, who trotted before Bevis, picked up a bone. He had picked it up before and dropped it; he took it again from habit, though he knew it was sapless and of no use to him. Bevis took it from his mouth, and they knew it at once as a duck’s drumstick. It was polished and smooth, as if the creature had licked it, or what was more probable carried it some distance, and then left it as useless. They had no doubt it was a drumstick of the wild duck Mark shot.

The trail went straight through sedges next, these were trampled flat; then as the sedges grew wider apart they gradually lost it in the thin, short grass. This was why they had not seen it from the land, there the path began by degrees; at the water’s edge, where the grasses were thick and high, it was seen at once. Try how they would, they could not follow the trail inland, they thought they knew how to read "sign," but found themselves at fault. On the dry, hard ground the creature’s pads left no trail that they could trace.

I was reminded of the beast on the island by a Twitter account that was tweeting Bevis line by line. It stopped suddenly, which made me worry that Bevis and Mark had been devoured by the beast. But I've now found the service is being continued on Bluesky.

So let's end with a shocking reminder from Bevis of the delinquency of Victorian schoolboys as they assemble the provisions to take to the island:

Mark took care that there should be some salt, and several bags of flour, and two of biscuits, which they got from a whole tinful in the house. He remembered some pepper too, but overlooked the mustard. They took several tins of condensed milk. From a side of bacon, up in the attic, they cut three streaky pieces, and bought some sherry at the inn; for they thought if they took one of the bottles in the house, it would be missed, and that the servants would be blamed. Some wine would be good to mix with the water; for though they meant to take a wooden bottle of ale, they knew it would not keep.

The Joy of Six 1343

"The UK AI Action Plan quite explicitly encourages building up a greater tolerance for 'scientific and technical risk'. This is the language and ethos of venture capital investing, but with government funding: ”move fast and break things” on the path to AI dominance." Elke Schwarz says the British government has thrown caution to the wind in favour of an uncertain, speculative benefit.

Amanda Dylina Morse says youth workers can be powerful counters to figures like Andrew Tate and provide a positive example of manhood.

Andrew Pakes, Labour MP for Peterborough, introduces his co-operative housing bill: "Co-operative housing sits in stark contrast to the exploitative rental market or unaffordable home ownership, because the model gives power and control to the people who live there."

"In 1958 the Roman Catholic archbishop, John Heenan, was stoned while visiting a sick woman at her home off Netherfield Road; in 1967, prime minister Harold Wilson, a Merseyside MP, advised against Queen Elizabeth attending the consecration of the city’s new Roman Catholic cathedral for fear of a Protestant backlash. In the following year, Protestant Party candidates were again elected to seats on the city council." Ian Cobain on the evaporation of sectarianism in Liverpool.

Jeff Swim goes wandering through pagan Wiltshire with Richard Jefferies: "The Uffington White Horse ... showed me that paganism, as it is expressed in Jefferies, is an aesthetic of the process of walking the countryside and seeing things scurry in and out of view as you proceed, of seeing lines and figures take shape as you move with them."

At last! I've found a site celebrating cats in cinema and television: Cinema Cats.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writing

This is another of the columns I write for the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counselling and Psychotherapy - you can read more about the JCPCP on the Egalitarian Press site.

I believe this column, on this blog's hero Richard Jefferies, was published a few issues ago.

Richard Jefferies: The granddaddy of nature writers

Nature writers lived for decades in the shadow of Evelyn Waugh’s William Boot, author of the Daily Beast’s ‘Lush Places’ column: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole." But today Boot would get a respectful mention in a Guardian survey of the new nature writing occasioned by Robert Macfarlane’s latest. 

The granddaddy of nature writing is the 19th-century Wiltshire journalist and novelist Richard Jefferies, who died in 1887 aged only 38. He has enjoyed periods of popularity, notably during the Second World War, when there was a widespread sense that rural Britain was somehow ‘what we are fighting for’, but still awaits a full rediscovery. 

When he is rediscovered, we shall find he is far more than just a nature writer. After London, for instance, is an early essay in post-apocalyptic fiction:

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.

That may just be the best nature writing Jefferies ever produced. It’s certainly good enough to build a convincing world, even if the action of the book is rarely worthy of living in it.

******

One of the things I value in Jefferies is his ability to surprise. Try his 1885 essay ‘Wild Flowers’:

If you have been living in one house in the country for some time, and then go on a visit to another, though hardly half a mile distant, you will find a change in the air, the feeling and tone of the place. It is close by, but it is not the same.

To discover these minute differences, which make one locality and home happy, and the next adjoining unhealthy, the Chinese have invented the science of Feng-shui, spying about with cabalistic mystery, casting the horoscope of an acre. There is something in all superstitions; they are often the foundation of science.

Fend-shui is mentioned by some 19th-century Western writers, but they tend to scoff where Jefferies sounds intrigued. More sympathetic accounts appeared in the early 20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it became a vogue.

******

Though it was published as a three-volume adult novel, Bevis: The Story of a Boy is the urtext, the motherlode, of children’s holiday adventure stories. It’s why generations of us grew up on books where nicely behaved kids found buried treasure or rounded up Nazi spies and criminal gangs – a school of fiction that, one critic suggested, began with the agricultural depression of the late 19th century and was killed off by the Beeching cuts and the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy.

I think I know Bevis well, but when I pick it up, the way the action is told entirely from a child’s point of view still astounds. Mark Twain got there first, but you won’t find many other examples in the fiction of this period. 

And Jefferies can surprise with snatches of social history too:

For seventy years he had laboured in that place, and never once gone out of sight of the high Down yonder, and in all that seventy years no one till Bevis and Mark, and now their pupil Jack, had learned to swim. Bevis's Governor was out of the question, he had crossed the seas. But of the true country-folk, of all who dwelt round about these waters, not one had learned to swim. 

Very likely no one had learned since the Norman Conquest. When the forests were enclosed and the commonality forbidden to hunt, the spirit of enterprising exercise died out of them. Certainly it is a fact that until quite recently you might search a village from end to end and not find a swimmer; and most probably if you found one now he would be something of a traveller, and not a home-staying man.

This explanation sounds deeply speculative, but it’s a fact that few young black Americans can swim and that this is often put down to poverty and historic segregation.

And this is a battle now being fought again in Britain. Jefferies was born at Coate Farm, just outside Swindon. Today the town’s Oasis leisure centre, from which a certain Nineties rock band took its name, lies empty and local politics are all about the struggle to reopen it – and in particular its swimming pool.

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Scoop ends with William Boot home from Africa and writing ‘Lush Places’ again in his study:

“The waggons lumber in the lane under their golden glory of harvested sheaves,” he wrote; “maternal rodents pilot their furry brood through the stubble."

But Waugh adds a chillier observation of his own: “Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry brood.”

Jefferies was well aware of this. In his Wood Magic, the young Bevis can talk to the animals and understand their speech. The world he discovers through this is far from the pieties of the Victorian nursery – it’s not one where birds in their little nests agree. 

Instead, Jefferies uses a convoluted tale of imperial conquest and political intrigue to make us understand that nature is a Darwinian war of all against all.

It’s not a jungle out there, but it is an English woodland.

Coate Water, Swindon, filmed from the air

Coate Water in Swindon was formed by diverting the River Cole. It was originally a reservoir for the Wilts & Berks Canal, and when the canal was abandoned in 1914, it became a pleasure park for the people of the town.

It was the inspiration for the New Sea of Richard Jefferies' book Bevis: The Story of a Boy, which was published in 1882 and is the urtext of all children's holiday adventure stories. In a later book, the postapocalyptic fantasy After London, the New Sea has effectively expanded to cover much of Southern England.

Jefferies' birthplace was Coate Farm, which is close to the reservoir and is now a museum devoted to his life and writings.

Jago Hazzard on what remains of Crystal Palace High Level station

I've been interested in this station ever since I read an account of its decay - netting and all - in its last years of operation in one of the Forgotten Railways books.

Jago Hazzard takes us through the history of this "magnificent missing station", and shows us what remains of it today. (A surprising amount.)

There's just time for a reminder that my man Richard Jefferies was not quite the child of nature that critics often assume. He spent a portion of his boyhood living happily with relations at Crystal Palace, just after Paxton's great glass building had been re-erected there.

You can support Jago Hazzard's videos via his Patreon page.

Listen to a short radio essay on Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum

The life of the country writer can be riven with contradictions. This blog's hero Richard Jefferies, for instance, spent a significant period of his childhood in South London, and seems to have been happier there than he was with his family back in Wiltshire. 

This makes me wonder if the endless adventures and exploration we see in his Bevis: The Story of a Boy are as autobiographical as is usually assumed. 

And Coate Water outside Swindon, beside and upon which these adventures were set, was an artificial reservoir built to supply the Wilts & Berks Canal.

As an adult writer, Jefferies moved nearer to London - to a still-rural Surbiton - to be closer to the market for his work. This proximity to the capital made its mark on that work - one example of this is an essay that was the subject of a Radio 3 Sunday Feature in 2022:

New Generation Thinker Will Abberley reconsiders Richard Jefferies' The Pigeons at the British Museum and argues that an essay written in 1884 should be essential reading today. He talks to Andrew Blechman, the author of Pigeons: The Fascinating Saga of the World's Most Revered and Reviled Bird, and to nature writer Richard Mabey.

You can listen to the feature on the BBC website.

Richard Jefferies' grave at Broadwater Cemetery, Worthing

Here's a pilgrimage I should make myself one day. Richard Jefferies is buried at Worthing because he spent his last days near the Sussex coast. It was hoped that the sea air would ease his tuberculosis, but it had no such effect and he was dead at 38.

Another notable rural writer is buried at Broadwater Cemetery: W.H. Hudson:

William Henry Hudson was one of Britain’s greatest nature writers but was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina of English parents in 1841. His powers of description when writing about the countryside were said to be unrivalled. 

He died in 1922 and expressed a wish to be buried near Richard Jeffries but this was not possible as that part of the cemetery was full. He claimed to have seen the ghost of Richard Jeffries while walking near Goring Church. ... 

There is a memorial to him and Jeffries at the entrance to the cemetery and a Garden of Remembrance in the North West Corner.

It's a shame the cemetery website spells Jefferies' name incorrectly, but then this blog's hero Malcolm Saville made the same mistake whenever he mentioned him.

The Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is now just for show

Salisbury Cathedral's foundations are so shallow that it effectively rests on a bed of gravel and water. If the water gets too low, it has to be topped up to keep the building up.

Which is why the cathedral, as well as attracting dubious Russian tourists, inspiring The Spire by William Golding and housing a bust of Richard Jefferies, has a dipstick.

This was used to measure the water level under the cathedral, so it could be topped up if necessary.

Paul Whitewick says a system of sluices was built to make this possible, but today the water is monitored automatically by the Environment Agency, so the Holy Dipstick of Salisbury is just for show.

But he couldn't discover where the water it taken from.

The Joy of Six 1237

Nick Cohen criticises collaborationist journalism: "Instead of a robust defence of democratic debate, we have had writers for the Financial Times opining that: 'A time will come when politicians can tell voters that Brexit was a turkey of an idea, that it makes Britain poorer than it needs to be, that it doesn’t even work as an immigration-cutting retreat from the world. That time isn’t far off. But it isn’t now.' The job of the collaborator here is not to ask hard questions but to police debate by saying that hard questions, or indeed any questions, are an inopportune tactic."

"While it's easy to dismiss something as amorphous as an improvement in quality of life, the dramatic reduction in traffic fatalities makes a stark case for what is often initially an unpopular measure. In Graz the number of accidents leading to serious injuries has dropped by 24 percent, despite an increase in the number of residents and traffic volume." Kaja Šeruga on moves to reduce the speed of traffic in many European cities.

"The state of our county courts has a direct and profound effect on the daily lives of millions of people. It is not just worthy to include it in manifestos but a potential vote-winner." John Hyde asks why the state of civil justice isn't an election issue.

Hugh Morris on how the Chair of Arts Council England threatened to cut £3.2 million of Welsh National Opera funding after music director Tomáš Hanus spoke out about the company’s financial difficulties.

Popular television programmes and general elections sometimes collide. Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey investigate.

Balladeer's Blog reads After London by Richard Jefferies: "The Thames and Severn Rivers have backed up, forming a large central lake in England. What was once London is a toxic marsh so deadly to human life that its gases and vapors, when carried by the winds, kill or drive mad humans exposed to them."

Raymond Williams: The Country and the City

Because I wanted to read again what he had to say about Richard Jefferies, I ordered a secondhand copy of Raymond Williams's book The Country and the City.

It arrived the other day with no index and an introduction by Tristram Hunt. We live in barbarous times.

Williams's treatment of Jefferies is as good as I remembered and still the best I have come across. I have also rediscovered his exposure of the way that "traditional country values" recede further into the past the more you try to pin them down. His excoriation of great English country house is a pleasure yet to come.

A recent article on Williams in Dissent describes the book well:

The Country and the City, which appeared in 1973, brings Williams’s critical acuity to the idea and reality of farm and village life, holding in a single vision the literary traditions of pastoral and counter-pastoral, the political inheritance of country radicalism, the material history of grinding exploitation, and the inhabited feelings of love, grief, hope, and defeat of the often invisible rural poor who were his people. 

His critical eye spares nothing, yet the book is animated by charitable, patient attention. A landscape, he showed, was “not a kind of nature but a kind of man,” a way of living on and seeing a region and terrain. He invited his readers to see the great country houses, in so many minds the defining features of rural England (just think of Downton Abbey), as monuments to the labour that was stolen to build them—not gracious ornaments on the land, but “barbarous” in their “disproportion of scale” to the lives that surrounded them. 

Living on land, in place, fulfilled a deep human appetite, but the ordinary condition of that appetite was to be denied satisfaction—dispossessed by enclosure, uprooted by new technology and new markets. Adding insult to injury, there were always rural squires willing to appoint themselves the voices of country virtues, praising the candor and integrity of the village against London cheats. Their conceits, however, rested on “the brief and aching lives of the permanently cheated,” who worked their lands and never saw London unless they’d come as refugees.

Williams declined to see the tradition of rural radicalism as a true alternative. Too often it was just sentimental longing for an intact world that might never have existed, and in any case had no future. In writing of the sweet and good countryside that had been stolen, “a human instinct was separate from the society . . . turning protest into retrospect, until we die of time.” 

The more properly political radicalism of land reformers, critics of enclosure, and opponents of industrialization struck him as poignant and sincere (unlike the landlords’ moralizing) but trapped in its own paradoxes. People who had managed to live decent lives within a temporary order for a generation or two tried desperately to make it permanent, usually by picking and choosing bits of feudal order and bits of liberal freedom. 

Most rural radicalism was “an idealization, based on a temporary situation and a deep desire for stability,” and “served to cover and evade the actual and bitter contradictions of the time.” By refusing to look clearly at their past or their present, nostalgic populists kept themselves from working toward a viable future.

The video above is of a programme based on the book that Williams made in 1979, six years after its publication. And this is his own recording of it off air, which is somehow wonderful.

Aldbourne: John Barleycorn was there before Mr Magister

Last time we were in Aldbourne we saw Jon Pertwee get the better of The Master, or Mr Magister as he was known in this Wiltshire village.

But before the Doctor was in Aldbourne, another BBC camera crew had been there. Click on the still above to watch Desmond Hawkins's meditation on changing attitudes to the countryside and whether village life can still exist in 20th century.

Early on there is much talk of the downs and the ancient bones buried on them. This put me in mind of "the man in the hill" in Richard Jefferies's Wood Magic:

"There never was a yesterday," whispered the wind presently, "and there will never be a tomorrow. It is all one long today. When the man in the hill was you were too, and he still is now you are here."

Jefferies duly gets a namecheck, but the film soon moves on to look at social change in the village. New houses, newcomers, changing farming methods and a groovy Sixties chick.

We see the Aldbourne Carnival, and the parish council meets in the hall where I once gave the Richard Jefferies Society's Birthday Lecture.

But the eeriness has not quite done with us. The film ends with an old boy singing John Barleycorn Must Die.