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

Sicily 1

Mount Etna

The South-Western slopes of Mount Etna - not just a simple cone

We came into Sicily at dusk, pretty much at sea level, skidding to a halt within sight of the city of Catania, the sea and the looming shape in the clouds that is Monte Etna, the highest volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. It was just possible to make out the shape of the summit in the fading light and gathering clouds, before the evening slipped away and night fell.  There was something awesome about it even in its indistinction. Though I had seen it on a number of occasions before, from different angles, including the air, this time it was serious - we were going up.

The top of Etna, Mongibello, from Catania Airport

The first part of the journey was probably the most difficult;  it was completely dark by the time we had found our way out of the car park and onto the Tangenziale and then we had to fight through the suburban traffic, negotiate a maze of minor roads and narrow streets and identify a B & B I had booked at Nicolosi, which, at 698 metres above sea level, was to be base camp.  The B & B, Sotto il Vulcano, was just right, and overlooked Monte Rossi, a tree clad cone formed in the catastrophic 1669 eruption. Our hosts, Salvo and Antonella, made us welcome, and in the morning, after fortifying us with a stunning breakfast of local produce, they advised us on our ascent.

We were hopeful that it would be a clear day, and although disappointed that the eruption of a couple of weeks passed had subsided, there was still enough smoke and steam visible to reassure me that the monster had not died.  Blue skies promised good visibility, and relative volcanic calm suggested that we would not be hit by flying bombs or pyroclasts (accidental lithics), as killed nine trekkers in 1979.

An accessory or accidental lithic, decorated by horizontal icicles formed by freezing wind

So we drove up A Muntagna as Sicilians call her, winding up the road from Nicolosi into the Parco Regionale. Although there was a mixture of vegetation, from cultivated fields to vibrant floral displays of Etna Broom and Ragwort, Milk Vetch and Juniper by the roadside, from vineyards to stands of Calabrian pine and chestnut and orchards of citrus and pistachio trees, much of the ground is black, dry, brittle, barren lava.

One of the secondary craters at Rifugio Sapienza

At 1910 metres, at Rifugio Sapienza, there is a settlement of hotels, eating places and souvenir shops and the foot of the cable car which sways you vertiginously up to a bar at 2500 metres.  It is here that you notice the cold.  Boots and jackets are for hire, if you came unprepared, and hot drinks revive the unwary.  It is thick with snow, too, and has been much of the way up the cable ride.

While it is possible to hire an expert alpine guide to trek on foot from the terminus, there are still 850 metres to climb and in deep snow and biting winds this is not the best season for such exertion.  We therefore catch the bus, a Mercedes Minibus with chains on the tyres, which in our case is full of jovial middle aged Germans. It is a bumpy ride, through ice canyons and over frozen lava, with views back across an azure sea and ahead to a belching crown.

The comfort of the vehicles comes to a stop at the Torre di Empedocle, so called because there is an ancient construction here, now buried in the lava and sublimates, where the philosopher Empedocles was said to live and study in the fifth century BC.  He was a native of Agrigento and the last Greek Philosopher to record his works in verse.  Matthew Arnold, in 1852, paid tribute to his mythological death in his  dramatic poem, Empedocles on Etna,

Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts,

Thick breaks the red flame;

All Etna heaves fiercely

Her forest-clothed frame.

The myth is strange, as Empedocles was fascinated by the volcano and is said to have believed that the upthrusting gases from the crater could support his body.  No Icarus he, however, and as his experiment failed he was consumed in the fiery flames of Etna's uncompromising throat.

As we disembark from our bus, the wind bites like an icy weasel, sharp needle teeth striking any exposed flesh.  We are about three hundred metres below the summit, though summit and crater give a misleading idea. This is not a simple cone, with a neat hole in the top.  It is raw, and diverse, and many fissures opened to release the magma and then have sealed over.  Jagged edges, clefts and uneven strands of lava, covered in snow and then moulded by the winds, make the terrain treacherous, and the Prefect of Catania decrees how close visitors may approach - a disappointment from a bureaucrat, but one that cannot be condemned for carelessness.

We are guided around the scene.  Led to see the views, told about how reliable this old volcano is, and instructed about incoherent materials and volatile products.  It's an extraordinary world, over twice as high as the highest point in the British Isles, under a burning sun, but scarred by a scouring wind.

It is amazing how many craters there are. Silent, apart from the whipping winds, and crumbly with a frozen black breakfast cereal underfoot.  It is wonderful to gaze through watering eyes down to the green valleys and blue sea far below, but extraordinarily close. It is tempting to think that Empedocles should have experimented with diving into the driving wind, to swoop kite like down to Bronte, or Adamo.

The sea to the south of Catania faintly in the distance

Looking south and west for more than a hundred kilometres

Looking north and east from over 100 kilometres away,
the looming shape dominates Sicily

And looking up to the top of Mongibello from as close as you can get

The great Mount Etna covers approximately 1250 square kilometres.  A 140 kilometre road, and a railway, circumnavigate the massif.  Small towns crowd up the slopes, in defiance of the power of the boiling rocks below the surface.  A day after we withdrew from Nicolosi the beast awoke again, blasting fire and dust into the atmosphere.  The Mayors of Nicolosi and nearby Zafferana Etnea pleaded for recognition of a disaster as their communal resources were pitted against a deep covering of black ashes that weighed down roofs and choked the streets.   

I guess it is the unpredictability that must be part of the attraction.  This will be no consolation to the frustrated councils that surround the mountain, but it is justifiably one of the greatest tourist attractions in not just Sicily but all of Italy.  Having seen it from afar, and from above, and now having set foot on the giant's shoulders, I sing its praise; I worship at the altar of Vulcan.

Scouting for Boys

Tales of the Windrush....

Otter Patrol - Burford 1962

When Scouting for Boys was first published in 1908, Lord Baden Powell’s experience of warfare, particularly in South Africa, informed his writing: A scout, as you know, is generally a soldier who is chosen for his cleverness and pluck to go out in front of an army in war to find out where the enemy are….. But he also acknowledged that, besides war scouts, there are also peace scouts, and he cited a variety of examples, such as the trappers of North America… missionaries over Asia…. The constabulary of North-West Canada…. real men in every sense of the word…. to support his thesis that Scouting also comes in very useful in any kind of life you are like to take up, whether it is soldiering or even business life in a city…..

So, of course, Scouting (a noun of sorts) was for boys….  Guiding was for girls.    How times have changed!  My edition of this seminal work was printed (and bought) in 1962, and although it has not been particularly well thumbed in recent years, I can still dip into it for essential advice on how to live my life.  From the initial Promise – On my honour I promise that I will do my best…..  through The Scout Law which includes No. 8, A Scout smiles and whistles under all difficulties,  (the whistling has got me into all sorts of trouble) and No. 10, A Scout is clean in thought, word and deed, (which I shall come to anon,) I can turn to page 89, Sign Round a Dead Body, where I read that, Twice lately bodies have been found which were at first supposed to be those of people who had hanged themselves; but close examination of the ground around them…. showed that murder had been committed!  There is so much I need to know here:  Very often after a murder the murderer, with his hands bloody from the deed and running away, may catch hold of the door, or a jug of water to wash his hands…..

And on page 131 I read the good Lord’s memorandum that, When I was a fairly active young bounder I went in for skirt-dancing.  It amused people at our regimental theatricals and it was good exercise for me…..  This and other useful pieces of information may not be in the latest editions of the work, but I could lend my copy, in a plain brown paper wrapper of course……

Anyway, back to the real world. With reference to my own experience as a Boy Scout, I chanced upon a 1974 edition of The New Era where Arthur Sadler, the longest serving Scout in the world, remembered the early days with Baden-Powell. He (Sadler) was 82 at the time and in robust good health, doing push-ups and other vigorous exercises every morning. He had been brought up in Essex, where he and his companions spent many hours hiking and camping in the copses surrounding Colchester, and they especially looked forward to the annual summer camp, which Baden-Powell often attended. Their favourite campsite was a seaside resort town named Walton-on-Naze on the east coast. To them it meant surf swimming, salt breezes, and a whole summer full of fun squeezed into one week. Reading on, I see that, thanks to his experiences in the First Colchester Troop, Scouting soon became an indispensable part of Arthur’s life. When his work took him to Berkhamsted, England, he was made assistant Scoutmaster of the local troop and organized a fife and drum corps, and perhaps it was his influence that created the pattern for the camps I attended in the sixties, although, At the age of 23, Arthur emigrated to America, arriving in Chicago on July 4, 1915…..

At camp, Sadler remembered how each day began with tent inspection. Everything, and I mean everything, was removed into the open air and arranged strictly as to detail. The bottom canvas was rolled up around each tent, and the entrance flaps were tied back to let the fresh sea breezes blow through. After that came the inspection of patrols and individual Scouts. This was just how we began our days, though not before the duty patrol had removed and emptied the brimming bucket of urine that had been filled overnight next to the flagpole. Those ancient bell tents, brailed and furled open to air away the condensation of nightly exhalations, had canvas like the Cutty Sark, and it was a finger-scarring job to tuck the toggles into the coarse loops stitched onto the outsides of the walls for this purpose.

Then, the days were spent in physical exercises, Scout advancement work, and fun. The high point of most days was the swim period. And in our case this was not in the brine off Walton-on-Naze, but in the chilly Windrush, reputedly the coldest river in England, though who was responsible for that particular folk-lore I cannot say. Our pool was formed where a disused mill race sluiced back into the mainstream, causing a broad and weedy expanse of water to swirl as currents met, a veritable maelstrom which nearly deprived us of my dear friend Ben. The remembrance of the sharp cold makes me shudder to this day, though no more than the thought of current health and safety regulations and what would be said today if a hoard of children were allowed to dive and splash at will in such a place. On one occasion, having been visited by my kind parents who had brought fruit cake and cider for a treat, I developed the most agonizing abdominal pains whilst swimming that for several hours after I vomited and screamed in agony as I felt a mole wrench tighten on my guts….. It was a wonderful time. At least Joe laughed!

And then, as Sadler recounted, Each night there was singing and storytelling around the campfire. Each Scout was expected to contribute something…. The spot where we held our campfire is still amongst the blackthorn bushes, sensibly away from the highly flammable camp, and I especially remember the joys of singing native South African songs as the sparks flew upward in the dark night of the high veldt…..

Something has got to Give

The photograph of me and others (above) has the following inscription on the back:

Forgive my handwriting, but the caption was added some years after the picture was taken (hence the uncertainty about the year) and it’s the only record I have of the first of three summer camps I attended some fifty years ago. The names Dunbar, Meir, Tooley and Terrell being those Otter patrol mates who, I guess, shared the tent behind us in the picture. Their whereabouts now, and in fact almost everything about them besides that canvas idyll in 1962, are a mystery to me. In my mind there are many vivid memories, but whatever happened to Dunbar, Meir, Tooley and Terrell I cannot say.

One memory is linked to the fact that in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on Sunday, August 5, 1962, a Sergeant in the LAPD received a call at 4.25 am local time from Dr. Ralph Greenson, a psychiatrist, proclaiming that, having been alerted by her housekeeper, he had found Marilyn Monroe dead, on her bed, at home. Later toxicology reports showed high levels of Nembutal (38–66 capsules) and Chloral Hydrate (14–23 tablets) in her blood. The level found was enough to kill more than 10 people. Now, although it may seem irrelevant, had the LAPD been properly trained and had read the relevant pages of Scouting for Boys, then they would have known that, When a Scout has learned to notice ‘sign,’ he must then learn to ‘put this and that together,’ and so read a meaning from what he has seen…. (page 103). Marilyn was found lying face down on her bed, but bruising and marks on her body showed that she had died on her back – any Scout would have seen that! And that was not all. Marilyn could not take tablets without being sick – and even if she had been able to she would have died well before the concentration found in her stomach had been reached. This particular evidence may have been beyond Baden Powell’s training, but as the great man said, Let nothing be too small for your notice, (page 91).

Anyway, the picture of us in a state of merriment was taken on the previous day, Saturday, August 4th. No such cheerfulness invaded the camp when front pages of the Monday papers brought the shock to our attention. I am not sure now quite what Norma Jean can have meant to me at the age of eleven; I doubt whether I had seen any of her films (repeats of Some Like it Hot could not have started, or if they had we would not have seen them as we had not yet got a television.) I suspect that her fame filtered to school boys through the concept of the pin-up, which must have been how the majority of her millions of fans became intimate with her, even if none of us ever possessed such an image. It is also possible that our adherence to the Scout Law was being tested here, and Law 4, A Scout is a friend to all…. meant that we could not resist the feeling of horror at death, especially of one who at 36 was probably about the same age as our mothers.

And also our sense of suspicion, our instinctive feeling that something was not right about this demise, was aroused. Not perhaps so much as to instinctively suspect the Kennedy brothers of involvement at the time, but enough to want to question Peter Lawford more closely. And, I suppose, in addition, there may have been some other, possibly pre-pubescent arousal? The naked lady, known to have been beautiful.…. Perhaps we felt guilt at the testing of the tenth article of the Scout Law, (A Scout is clean in thought…..)

That said, the site has changed little, although the field has gained a wood to the right which simply was not there in the sixties.  The human traces are gone; archaeologists could perhaps unearth broken toggles, bent tent pegs, or rusted Swiss Army knives, which would prove that once the First (?) Berkhamsted Scout Troop accessed this landscape, but presently the occupants are cattle, and ghosts…..

The precise location is on the:

Or at OS grid reference 273123, just north east of the remains of Widford Village, where the little church of St Oswald still stands. This is less than a mile from the village of Swinbrook, and about two miles from Burford. Our journey there, in an antiquated charabanc, took some three hours or more from the school at Berkhamsted. The final stages, with sick bag in hand, took us up the narrow Blacksmith’s Lane from Fulbrook, to the gate at the head of the field. Having disembarked we would follow our lorry down the track into the field where we would unload the ton or so of tents, poles, kitchen equipment, supplies, and essential items of kit (axes, shovels, pegs, buckets, et alios). Pitching camp was formulaic, disciplined and hard work. No self-erecting glass-fibre poled ultra-lite tents for us, no field kitchen caravans, no portaloos. It was digging and hammering and pulling and pushing, until the city was established. Although it didn’t cross my mind at the time, this must have been how Alexander the Great travelled, or how Henry V established himself before St Swithin’s Day at Agincourt. Our own packs would then be unravelled, sleeping bags and slippery ground sheets smoothed out, vainly trying to find a patch that was (a) flat and (b) comfortable, without clods of earth or stones to keep us restless all the night long.

The next step would be to scamper down to the river, passing St Oswald’s, and the manor house at Widford. The church, which I believe must have been kept locked when we were there as we never ventured in, is now breathing new life, though in a very ancient way. It has 19th century box pews, a slab stone floor, crumbling plaster bearing traces of 14th century frescos, and plenty of woodworm in the pulpit. Internally it is divided in two by a gothic arch from the 13th century, though it has remnants of an 11th century Saxon or Norman building; in 1904 it was found to have been built on the base of a Roman house or temple and there were two areas of uncovered Roman mosaic (though they are now in the Cirencester museum). The manor house, this church and one or two cottages are all that remain of a medieval village that must have grown up on the site of a Roman Villa. One significant treasure that now stands within the west end of the church is a Morphy Richards electric convection heater, exactly the same as one we had at home in the early sixties. Somehow I felt an emotional bond with this strange object – just as I felt when looking up at the two great boards in the nave which bear the Ten Commandments in bold script.

Then we would run to the disused mill (now reconstituted as elegant homes) where with hardly a moment of hesitation we would leap and dive into the swift currents. Now these river banks are partly garden and partly overgrown, private and inaccessible, though a glimpse of the mill race from the road to Burford will give an idea of the excitement to be had in that sparkling water. 

The pattern was the same most days. An evening meal served by the staff, who included some of our dads, including Ben's, but who were mainly part time Scouters from the teaching staff. Elsie (from his initials, ELC) Cunnell, until he abandoned us for a teaching post in Corsica; Roger le Bargy, whose rendering of Winnie the Pooh was the best I ever heard, but who sadly died under a train at Berkhamsted station some years later; Roger Beavis, I think, among others, as well as Philip Coates, a cellist and music teacher whose enthusiasm for Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition nearly cured me of serious music for life. After the sausages had been consumed, and the greasy plates clattered in a bucket of cold water, we were put to bed, to be serenaded by sounds of laughter, clinking and then singing from the canteen marquee, reminding us, if only we knew, of scenes from Animal Farm that might have stirred left-wing tendencies had we been so bold.

Leisure time was often spent swigging bottles of Corona, a fizzy drink which came in bright colours (lime green, raspberry red, agent orange, etc) and which we bought from the Quartermaster’s stores (about whom we sang lustily by the camp fire as well).  We also had one afternoon completely free and I remember once making the trek into Burford with my friend Denys, where, with mischief aforethought, I bought ten Rothmans, to smoke dangerously in the woods above the camp, the acrid smoke seeming so illicitly exciting, and making me feel much older than the new chaps who played so innocently below.  They made me feel dizzy too and were seriously against the Scout Law and BP’s precepts of being healthy (A scout does not smoke.  Any boy can smoke; it is not such a very wonderful thing to do.


  But a scout will not do it because he is not such a fool…..  Any scout knows that smoking spoils his eyesight, and also his sense of smell, which is of the greatest importance to him for scouting on active service…..)  Of course I knew….

Sundays were special, and Church parade was to Swinbrook, where we filled the nave and where one of us would read the lesson.  One detail of the church caught our eyes, which was the repaired stained glass which remembered an event of some twenty-two years before, an unnerving thought now that more than fifty years have passed since then.

The church is also visited for the remarkable tombs of the Fettiplace family who for generations found repose in their niches here. This was not something we were aware of then, but revisiting turns another page.

Another famous family have links with the locality. Asthall Manor, just down the Windrush another mile or so, was where the Second Baron Redesdale and his wife made their home early in the twentieth century. Their seven children grew up to achieve fame in different ways, with Unity becoming a friend of various German Fascists, including Hitler. At the outbreak of war in 1939 she supposedly shot herself in the head (though another theory is that she was hospitalised to bear Hitler’s child). She certainly survived and came home to Swinbrook, where the family then lived in Mill House next to the Swan Inn, but she never fully recovered and died of meningitis some years later.

Meanwhile, her sister Diana married Oswald Mosley and spent the war in Holloway prison. On the other hand Jessica became a communist and lived in the United States after participating in the Spanish Civil War. Both she and Nancy became well known writers. Nancy, Diana and Unity are buried in Swinbrook churchyard, and their brother Thomas, who died in action in Burma, is commemorated on a plaque within the church. The longest surviving member of this family was Deborah, the youngest, who married the Duke of Devonshire and was instrumental in the revival of Chatsworth House, their Derbyshire home. She was, until her recent death, also the owner of the Swan Inn in Swinbrook, and had something of a hand in renovating this pub, which will do for a night’s comfort now that pitching a tent in a nearby field may not be acceptable to the local farmers.  [It was also where David Cameron took Francois Hollande for lunch in January 2014....]

I love to walk alongside the Windrush and in the surrounding countryside.  The landscape is delightful, especially when dappled by cloud; the villages of finest Cotswold stone, the woods and fields fresh with restful colour.  There’s the intrusion of massive US warplanes shuddering in and out of RAF Brize Norton, or Fairford, and the old wool town of Burford (with its fine church) is now a bottleneck to traffic and overrun with trippers, many of whom are from Japan, but it is still a wonderful part of this country, where perfection is always around the corner.

We all have our memories, and our reasons for remembering. Fifty years ago my friends and I were schoolboys and Scouts, and we were brought here unthinking perhaps of where it would take us, or what it meant. We learned some things and discovered some things – perhaps as much from the shocking death of Marilyn Monroe (and almost at the same time of Tony Hancock....) as from the teaching of Baden Powell, but who knows? One thing is certain, and that is that our lives flowed on like the river and developed in different, if perhaps predictable ways. Some thirty years or so ago I returned, to look at Swinbrook Church with my parents and my wife and her mother. It was a happy visit, adding another layer of memory within my mind. But then that too will still one day, and what then remains will be in someone else’s head.

I am grateful for the memories. No harm came of our experiences  and I am sure that, despite my scepticism, there are benefits to be had from the relative innocence of the Scouting movement. There were pleasures to be had at the time, too, from the urgency of swimming in cold water, one of the better experiences of the outdoor world, to the laughter we had, whether competing at welly-throwing, or making and baking unleavened breads over an open fire. I learnt to enjoy the delight of waking to a damp morning, the soaking wetness of dew and the smell of the earth.

On 24 hour camp (when exiled to one end of the field, out of sight of the main camp) I first encountered a rabbit with Myxomatosis, the poor creature blinded by the irritation, hopping hopelessly towards its doom. We heard things through the darkness of the bell tent teepees, as well, that made us feel as if we were on grand prairies, or in the densest of forests. Noises of the world going about its business; sounds of life beyond our experience.

A wanderer is man from his birth.

He was born in a ship

On the breast of the river of Time.

(The Future by Mathew Arnold)

It is still not too late to learn…..

 

Nostalgia is a fine thing

(in retrospect)