Escape to the Country

North by North Norfolk

Escape to the Country is billed, by BBC2, as a series which helps prospective buyers find their dream home in the country.  In each programme we discover why they want to move, what they're looking for and which part of Britain they've set their heart on. In their chosen area, we show them three idyllic country properties that match their search criteria and their budget. The last option is the 'mystery' house, a property that challenges our buyers' perceptions about what they really want….. At the end of the programme, our house hunters discuss all the properties they've seen and decide which one is the best option for them.

This, the MemSahib’s favourite programme (there are endless repeats on Really) might better be summarised as ageing middle class couples with pets dream of The Good Life…..

So this week, retired couple, Ricky and Mandy, with their pet dragon, Meadow, are seeking to sell their priceless accommodation in Harpenden, Herts, to relocate to North Norfolk, to benefit from the endless grey skies, the winds from Siberia, and extreme traffic at weekends.  They are quite flexible in the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, but would like a library, servants’ quarters, possible a priest hole, and stabling for their entourage.  They prefer period properties but are not keen on low beams.  The kitchen should be quite separate from the dining room, and Mandy would like a room for her tapestry work.  Ricky would like outbuildings for his taxidermy, as he loves stuffing birds.  The couple don’t mind if there is some renovation work to be done, as they are up for a bit of a project.

The budget is flexible, as house prices in Harpenden are astronomic, so this should be a doddle for our presenter, who will take them to a selection of properties which are usually isolated and inaccessible. The last property of course will be the Mystery House, which will be totally out of keeping with the couple’s intentions, but which will at least make the presenter smirk with supercilious smugitude….

So, Ricky and Mandy, why North Norfolk?

Well we are great fans of Alfred Hitchcock and our favourite is the one in which Cary Grant outruns the birds in a cornfield having driven along the coast completely drunk, and then has his face chiselled on a rock near the Statue of Liberty, where Tippi Hedren pulls him up into the upper berth on the night train from Liverpool Street.  Ever since then we have yearned for a place surrounded by great flocks of birds, and want to live like James Mason…..

OK, that's great, and, well, we do have some very exciting properties lined up.  So cram into the back of my old Chevrolet while the cameraman films me driving…..

And the first property is a mile and a half from the village of Aylsham, which has a farmers' market twice a month, but our property is a Jacobean house with its own church and pub.....

Blickling Estate

First impressions?

Quite nice, I suppose, but it looks single glazed.  And can you get children to sweep the chimneys?

Ha ha, of course.  Interestingly Anne Boleyn lived here, before she was beheaded that is..... Shall we go inside?  You will see that the current owners are packed and ready to vacate....

But you will be interested to see that the table is laid for dinner with their friends, which gives you an idea of the kind of people they were.....

Ooh, I like Joyce Grenfell, and isn't David Cameron an Astor by marriage? But  Kermit Roosevelt? Wasn't he an alcoholic? And Joachim von Ribbentrop?  Was he Jewish?  What did they eat?

I'm afraid I can't tell you that, as they ate in French....

Mmmm, I like Maryland chicken! Can we keep the cook?

I'm afraid she's off, but you do get the lady by the tapestry upstairs....

And there's a chap who hangs around the piano in the library.  He's free....

Very nice.  What about the pictures?

You can have this one.....

Poor chap.  He must have worked very hard.

I think it was the table plans. Anyway, must press on as we've lots more in store....  But before we go, have a little look at the garden,

Of course you get the cows, and notice the little sign in the bottom left of the picture.... 'pumped sewer' - all mod cons....

Our next property is not far away....

Felbrigg Hall

What do you think?

I don't like the motto. "Gloria Deo In Excelcis."  A bit 'in your face' isn't it? Did nuns live here? And again we have chimneys and single glazing, but it looks a little more manageable than the last one.

Well it is also Jacobean, and it is one of the largest estates in Norfolk, with 1,760 acres, including 520 acres of woodland.

Plenty of firewood then?

And you do get a pianist with this one.....

Not sure I like the children.  Can they clean chimneys?

Ha ha, I expect they would love it. Come through to the dining room. Is this to your liking?

What's on the menu?  Apart from rubber pheasants?

Bit heavy for us, don't you think dear?

But you don't have far to walk to the Drawing Room where you can sleep it off....  This is where the last owner, Robert Wyndham Ketton-Cramer, sank into depression and allowed the house to crumble.

A little dark, don't you think?

But subsequently the estate was managed by Christopher Mackie, whose wife Mary wrote "Dry Rot and Daffodils" - have you read it?

No but we heard "Cobwebs and Cream Teas" on the radio.  It was quite good.  Anywhere for my taxidermy?

Oh yes.  Between the kitchen and the Dining Room, below stairs. The squire's grandfather was a keen ornithologist.....

Nice.  I can see he loved his birds. And what about the kitchen?

Fully equipped.  Quite modern.....

And so, as the sun sets over the North Norfolk Coast, we come to the end of our first day of house-hunting for Ricky and Mandy.  Tomorrow we will continue with our search, and of course we will finish with the Mystery House, which I am sure will cause waves.....

Zzzzzzzzzz.... (Time for an advertisement break)

So we start our second and final day of house hunting in the superb region of North Norfolk, in the hamlet of Oxburgh, which has a pub, though you would have to drive seven miles to Swaffham for a pint of milk and the Daily Mail.

Today's first house is a fine example of a late medieval moated manor house.  Outside you only have seventy acres of garden and woodland,  but inside you do get a priest hole as the Bedingfield family were Catholic.  

Oxburgh Hall

What do you think, guys?

Quite nice.  Is it haunted?

Well there is a curtain that is always billowing rather spookily in the Queen's chamber.....

But more to the point, a rather large lady has often been seen inspecting the furniture in the Master bedroom.....

Oh my goodness!  Chilling!  I'm not sure this is for us.

Well it does have some very nice period pieces, like this fireplace....

Mmmmm. Shame about the cat.

And I rather like the way they have made use of window seats....

No curtains.  People can see in.

So I get the feeling that this one has not got the wow factor?  Shall I take you to the Mystery House?

Indeed. We can't wait.

And what do you think it will be?

A barn conversion? A new build? A WWII airfield?

Not this time!  I'm taking you to the village of Snettisham, mentioned in the Domesday Book, and home to an RSPB nature reserve, 

so you'll get plenty of birds....

I'm afraid the railway station was closed in 1969, but Nicholas Pevsner claimed that the 14th century St Mary's Parish Church "is perhaps the most exciting decorated church in Norfolk."  This is also famous for the "Snettisham Hoard," a series of discoveries of precious metal objects from the Iron Age, currently in the British Museum.

And the property I am going to show you is just down from the Yacht Club....

What do you think, guys?

I'm blown away..... It's perfect, don't you think dear?

But can we afford it?

So we have reached the end of our house search in North Norfolk.  Retired couple, Ricky and Mandy, were looking for a detached property with room for their interests, and with a comfortable budget.  We showed them three desirable family residences, each with period features, including plenty of grounds and outhouses, but somehow none of these quite hit the spot.  The last property, the Mystery House, was something of a gamble, but Ricky and Mandy seemed really taken with it, despite the fact that there were no servants' quarters nor stables.  

On the coast of the Wash in the village of Snettisham, within a short walk of local facilities, including a fish and chip shop, and with views of vast flocks of birds as the tide sweeps in, the house caught Mandy's imagination at once.

I have to say that this just goes to show how the Mystery House tests the imagination and how, sometimes, it releases unexpected ideas. Sadly, in this case, although Ricky and Mandy made an offer on the Mystery House, they were unable to proceed, as the lease does not permit the keeping of dragons on or near the premises..... 

But Ricky and Mandy will continue their search for their dream home in North Norfolk, and I am sure that sooner or later, with their affection for Hitchcock, birds, and their pet dragon Meadow, something will turn up.....

Oxford

An Oggsford Man...........





Oxford: "That sweet city with her dreaming spires" (Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis) from Christ Church Meadow

I am in the New Theatre, Oxford, and Henry VIII is cheating on Anne Boleyn, attracted to Jane Seymour after Anne has produced a daughter.  Henry looks a little like a cross between Mick Fleetwood and Bill Bailey, and he has a neat chain-mail cod-piece, which makes it seem as if he is wearing his underpants over his trousers.  He is clearly a bad egg, and our sympathies rise with the Treorchy Male Voice Choir's maelstrom chorus as Anne defies history with her brave, untimely death. 

I exaggerate a little.  It wasn't the Treorchy Choir; it was the Welsh National Opera, performing Gaetano Donizetti's Anna Bolena.  And I am ignoring the importance of male heirs.  But underlying the interest is that in the 1530s Henry VIII drove through more radical reforms than Michael Gove ever dreamed of.  In some ways Henry VIII was to England what Ceausescu was to Romania, or Gaddafi was to Libya:  on the face of it a much-loved leader with the greater good of his country at heart, concerned about the stability and the future of his independent realm, but in reality a mean, selfish, twisted, callous figurehead of a short-sighted and biased regime that was responsible for the one of the greatest acts of vandalism against the arts ever perpetrated.  The dissolution of the monasteries was not just a political move designed to remove power from the extremely rich religious barons, but it was also the destruction of superb architecture, and thousands of extraordinary works of art that were contained within those buildings.



King Henry VIII

I am in Hertford College, in the rather dark lobby outside the chapel, and Helena gropes for a switch behind a great wooden frame.  Suddenly William Tyndale, famous for his translations of the Bible, is standing before me.  Born in Dursley in the Cotswolds, in 1494, he was a student at Magdalen Hall, which later became Hertford College.  He then left England in 1524 and wandered Europe, learning Hebrew (something that was against the law in England), writing, and translating the bible.

I am visiting Hertford because my father was a student here immediately before and after the second world war.  And here is Tyndale, another Oggsford man whose life ended in strangulation and conflagration in 1536, in Belgium. He had been betrayed by a spy from Oxford, Harry Phillips, sent by the Holy Roman Emperor to track down the man who translated the Bible into English (about 90% of the King James' Bible was translated by Tyndale). 

 

William Tyndale: Hertford College



Tyndale was influenced by Erasmus and by Luther and was one of the greatest scholars of his age, which was one of extraordinary technological development:  the printing press was the iPhone of its day, and it became impossible to suppress the circulation of ideas when they were in print form (and they were in the vernacular).  At one point the Bishop of London bought six thousand copies of Tyndale's New Testament and burned them on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral in an attempt at eradicating the smuggled blasphemy. 





Old Buildings, Hertford College



Anne Boleyn, who was probably better read than her husband, was a fan.  And Henry himself was impressed by the Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) which attacked papal authority.  But then in Practice of Prelates (1530) Tyndale condemned Cardinal Wolsey and Henry's divorce.  So he lost his Royal Favour.....





From the staircase in Hertford College



And speaking of Cardinal Wolsey..... he was appointed Lord Chancellor and Chief Councillor on Christmas Eve 1515 and was enormously powerful for fourteen years, during which he suppressed an Augustinian Monastery in Oxford, in 1524, and founded in its stead Cardinal College. 



Tom Quad: Christ Church



After Wolsey's fall from power in 1529, which came about essentially because his position as a Roman Catholic Cardinal linked him too closely to Rome for Henry's comfort, Henry himself renamed the College as Christ Church. Then, not long after, in 1546, he created a Bishop of Oxford as one of six new Bishops to consolidate his supremacy over the last embers of resistance in the ruins of the monasteries.  An outcome of this is that the Cathedral Church of Oxford is the smallest Cathedral in the country and is also Christ Church College Chapel.





Oxford Cathedral - Christ Church





The Church is essentially twelfth century, and is one of the oldest buildings in Oxford, but much of its interior was redesigned in the 1870s by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the grandfather of Giles, who designed the red phone box,a(mong other things.....) The Church also boasts stained glasses by Edward Burne-Jones.....





Stained Glass by Edward Burne-Jones in the Cathedral



And this College also draws innumerable tourists inspired by such names as Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson both studied and taught here), and Harry Potter.....  Not to mention six Prime Ministers.





Great Hall, Christ Church



Teaching began at Oxford not long after the Norman Conquest, but in 1167 when Henry II banned students from going to Paris it became very well established. It had achieved world renown by the fourteenth century, and Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenforde was perhaps a typical student of the time.





The School of Divinity





In the fifteenth century all teaching and examining took place in the School of Divinity, which is now a part of the Bodleian Library.





The Bodleian Library





As the University's fame and fortune increased, the Colleges, replacing the religious houses that had existed before Henry VIII, developed and embellished themselves.  Hertford copied the Bridge of Sighs (or rather the Rialto Bridge - some confusion there!) from Venice:





The Bridge of Sighs - Hertford College



All Souls College employed Nicholas Hawksmoor, whose rebuilding of the North Quadrangle is one of Oxford's splendours:





All Souls College



While Christopher Wren provided the University with the Sheldonian Theatre:

The Sheldonian Theatre

Which has an extraordinary ceiling, made up of 32 painted canvas panels (the work of Serjeant Painter to the King, Robert Streater, in 1668/9) which have been recently restored:





The painted ceiling of the Sheldonian Theatre



And just nearby, drawing considerably on plans by Nicholas Hawksmoor, James Gibbs produced the Radcliffe Camera, one of the iconic buildings in the city.



Radcliffe Camera

 

In the meantime, following the death of Henry VIII, his daughter Mary I attempted to re-establish Catholicism and so tried Bishops Latimer and Ridley, and Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin; found them guilty and burnt them; if nothing else continuing in her father's tradition of being unreasonable and a little on the cruel side.







Convocation House



Less than one hundred years later, during the civil war, Oxford was the choice of Charles I as a place to hold his counter parliament, with the Lords sitting in the Convocation House and the Commons in the School of Divinity.

And in the meantime, the people of Oxford, and the students and visitors and drinkers and talkers, gather in their own parliaments to debate the world and its paradoxes.  One favourite haunt of my father's was the Turf Tavern:



An institution almost as old as the University



Which is almost impossible to find and harder still to get out of, but which is recorded to have been serving beer since at least 1381, as Richard II is known to have taxed it.

The High Street

Oxford bustles on in the 21st century. In its books and buildings may linger much of the history of this world, and in its industry there may be some of the future too.

Students still dominate, the click and whirr of bicycles in the morning filling the brass rubbed streets around the centre, the slap of flat-soled shoes, the brush brush of thick stockings, the very slight squeak of hinges on heavy spectacle frames that are just a little loose.....



Green-stocking



The jiggle of saddle springs that are just a little too low....

While the museums attract others who may wish to study in a more individual way:





Work in Progress - The Ashmolean Museum



In the windows of the colleges, and framed by their arches, we see ourselves, and our pasts, and our futures.  Some of us were privileged, or gifted, or coached, or goaded, and made it to spend some 72 weeks within these sheltered courts, becoming fine china rather than clay pots.  Some of us perhaps could have made it, but never found the key, or the lock, or the door....  Others, like Jude the Obscure, dreamed of the advantages and the glory, but fell back and died of the cold world behind.



Reflections, Peckwater Quadrangle, Christ Church



Others, like Harry Potter, perhaps, or Jay Gatsby, dreamed different, or bigger, dreams. They wanted divorce from the world of the Muggles, the world of the everyday, and dreamed so hard that others caught that dream, and wound into it to develop their fortunes, elegantly billowing like Daisy Buchanan or ashily overseeing the road to riches like Dr T J Eckleberg.  Lying high to avoid deception.

As seen in Harry Potter - Christ Church stairs

Jay Gatsby, did extraordinarily well in the war. He was a captain before he went to the front, and following the Argonne battles he got his majority and the command of the divisional machine-guns. After the Armistice he tried frantically to get home, but some complication or misunderstanding sent him to Oxford instead.

And so the fixer, Wolfsheim, boasts of Jay Gatsby, He's an Oggsford man.....  He went to Oggsford College in England......

Is it chance, or fortune, or the willing cooperation of the underclass, that does this? Gatsby was a fake, a fraud, a slender fraction of a man. Was Henry VIII something similar? His dreams started with his brother's wife. And when he could not have her, he moved the goalposts.

Ultimately my confusion is between my culture and my instinct.  I leave the theatre and its grey hairs and the streets are punctuated by children playing with alcohol and tobacco, laughing in cross-legged groups within darkened doorways.  Police cars parade like overconfident migrants.  I am in a dream.  I wander the college gates, the market stalls, the rainy park.  The night kisses me goodnight with an early moon, and I take my weary leave of the real world, the world of kebabs and clubs and youthful excitement in company.

I wake in my college room, a sepulchral quiet weighing on me like the guilt of accusation.  I tiptoe out into the garden. Anna Bolena turns her back on me, attending to her hair.

I know it is not my fault. 

But.

I need to ride my bike.  To fudge my muted colours in the mix.

ANNE BOLEYN'S SPEECH AT HER EXECUTION
19 MAY 1536, 8 O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING

Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.



Dio che mi vedi in core,
mi volgo a te...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNDKcPBEvLI



The Boleyn Cup, Cirencester