GYPSY GROVE

GYPSY GROVE

Not what you would expect. It runs at the back of the houses, and used to be lined with trees – but trees grow too tall, or else not at all, or push over a wall, and so they have to be removed and only scrub grows back. There are, of course, old sepia photographs to substantiate my fantasies, which grew out of what I really experienced fifty years ago, when, to my surprise, I found Gypsy Grove taking me tranquilly and directly from St James Road to Shirley High Street. There was a bit of rubbish, and some graffiti, but hey, it was the seventies, and the Shah was still in power and had to be brought down by people writing things on walls in Southampton. Sometimes, the writing on the wall was in Persian. Around that time, I learnt that if you could peel an apple so carefully that the peel remained whole and formed one single piece it would spell out the name of your future spouse. I was never quite sure if I was destined to marry The Shah of Iran or Down With.

What fascinated me about Gypsy Grove was not the name – though it would have been good to see a vardo parked somewhere along it, and a hobbled horse cropping the grass – but the way it sneaked straight through between all the houses, which had been built from the 1880s to the 1950s in various estates and developments, each laid out with curves and crescents and cul-de-sacs, creating a ground-plan that might have been the envy of a Renaissance expert in fortifications, like Leonardo da Vinci, whose skill at that kind of thing, designed to fool besiegers and make direct frontal assaults impossibly dangerous, made him more attractive to your average Italian prince than his ability at anatomical drawing or aeronautical invention. In other words, it was easy to get lost, following what you thought was a straight line, but wasn’t, because the road had a dead end, and when you retraced your steps to take the next side road you found there was a bend in it that had you facing the wrong way.

That was and is the thing about Southampton: there are paths through it that take you places you don’t expect to go, alleys you never anticipated that lead straight from the dead end of one street to the dead end of another one. They conduct you past garden fences, over a stream whose existence you wouldn’t guess, except for the faintest whisper of water and a wisp of mist late on a summer night, because the air above the stream is cooler, and then they let you out somewhere quite different. Southampton has been dropped on to a pattern from the past, covering it but not effacing it.

Some of it may come from the days when it was all prime farmland – which it must have been, and still is, to judge from the tenacity with which plants of all kinds force their way up through the asphalt and out of the cracks between the paving slabs. Some of it may be relics of the parks associated with the big houses and grounds that spread north inland from the town and port, to accommodate successful merchants and associated trades – gone now, leaving their names on the streets and roads that lead away from The Avenue into the developments of the late nineteenth century, which commemorate the heroes and heroism of their times, Alma Road, Gordon Avenue, Kitchener, Khartoum, Omdurman, Livingstone…

But what determines the shape of Southampton are its rivers. To begin with, there are the two which define the central triangle of settlement: Itchen to the east, Test to the West.

Itchen, if you like, is the local one, because it rises near Cheriton, flows north to Alresford to fill a lake covered with waterfowl, then turns left and fills watercress beds before making its leisurely way past Avington House where Charles II took all kinds of pleasure, then through a fine but decayed system of water-meadows to Winchester, where it turns south and turns a mill, and keeps the roots of the cathedral moist, and waves reeds and bulrushes at the back of the College and sustains an obliging path that lets you walk all the way to Southampton, as if you were a mediaeval pilgrim, who might even have claimed the Wayfarers Dole at St Cross, on the last leg of your journey home from a visit to the shrine of St Thomas of Canterbury, to take ship for foreign parts.

Test seems to come from further away, and to be more purposeful than Itchen, striving ever southward, set on reaching the sea. It is a solitary stream, flowing largely through the grounds of the rich, rarely past homely back gardens, debouching finally into reed beds that are hospitable only to waterfowl and marsh-dwellers. A road roars across it, looking down on the many-arched old bridge, the diving-board for tombstoners. Once south of that, it ceases to be a river and turns into an arm of the sea, its shore available for exploitation.

Once, if you left Southampton Central on the Down side, you found yourself on the beach; now, you have to cross a busy, more or less four-lane road to reach the ragbag of architecturally offensive consumer units on reclaimed land, some of which was reclaimed from the sea, and some from the Pirelli factory. None of the socially interesting suggestions for the use of that suddenly available space so near the centre of the town ever came to anything.

But from the road that runs along it, where once the waves washed and the mud stank, you can see The Walls, which rise impressively high above you. With the lack of forethought which characterises so much of government policy, to the present day and beyond, they were only built after the French raid of 1338, which sent much of the town up in flames. Before that, the major danger was perceived as coming from the rest of England, rather than overseas. Norman merchants’ houses, which probably doubled as warehouses and stood immediately on the quay, had doors and windows blocked with stones and were thus incorporated more or less overnight into the fortifications. Through West Gate, Henry V and his men marched on to West Quay to embark for France in a temporarily successful attempt to make good his claim to the throne of at least part of that disparate region, many areas of which continued to belong to England, in various ways, for a good few years more.

What interests me is the sudden disparity in height. Southampton is on a long peninsula between the two rivers, poking its sharp tongue out at the sea, which calls itself Southampton Water, and that peninsula slopes down quite gradually towards its slightly vulgar end. But every now and then, there are sharp and unexpected drops. One, for example, is the swoop of Bevois Valley, named after Bevis of Hamton, who slew the giant Ascupart in some romance or other. This particular big dipper is a thrill for cyclists going towards town, and a torment to them coming back, and probably derives from a stream coming off the main north-south ridge of the peninsula, which is The Avenue, or possibly from a landslip of some kind. Hard to tell, when so much of what might be the flood-plain is covered with buildings.

Covering interesting areas with nondescript buildings is a habit of Southampton, in which it was aided by the Luftwaffe, who enabled the redevelopment of a large area of the oldest part of the town, south of the West Gate, as a buddleia-speckled lorry-park, including a couple of Norman churches that were sentimentally preserved as roofless ruins, looking like decommissioned bus-shelters. The demolition of a considerable number of Victorian terraces, filled with small and interesting junk-shops, which lay over the duly excavated Saxon settlement of Hamwih, largest port and trading entrepôt in Europe in the 7^th century, culminated, not in the creation of a Visitor Centre on the model of the Yorvik Experience, but in a forest of traffic-lights and an asphalt-covered road-interchange that was in the running for Most Confusing Junction In Europe.

I have tried not to stray across either Dark Water, and wish to remain on The Land Between the Two Rivers, but I have to mention the Itchen Bridge, because it illustrates the same strange discrepancy of levels that haunts me in this city. Once upon a time, the road from the east came down a slope to cross the Itchen, and arrived at a Floating Bridge, which one might call a Chain Ferry. It was pulled to and fro by chains on drums, and left the channel free for boats of all sizes to go upriver or down-river, as they wished. L.S. Lowry portrayed it, in his inimitable fashion, when he came to visit a lady-friend in the city, and his version hangs in Southampton City Art Gallery. But it constituted a bottle-neck, and so a bridge was built, high above the water, taking traffic to what was once a lively part of town, by the old dock-gates, where, if you look, you can find Terminus Station, from the days when the next stage after the railway was the sea, and, if you look even harder, The Old Bowling Green, that claims to be from the thirteenth century, even before Geoffrey Chaucer’s father was here. Of course, to reach ground level after the bridge, or to reach the bridge from the earth, traffic has to whizz round a tight-curved helter-skelter on full lock in low gear with foot down. And the bridge attracts its share of tragedies in the making.

When I lived in Southampton, I taught at the University, and had most to do with that part of the town – but even though I walked from home to work, I still found unexpected surprises of a physical kind, which, on reflection, seemed to me, if not metaphysical, then metaphorical. It wasn’t just the Big Dipper of Church Lane, or the unexpected cut-through from Highfield Crescent, or the vast rough open space between the back of Broadlands Road and the back of Granby Grove and Sirdar Road – it was, in one particular instance, the precipitous garden of the house that belonged to the Professor of French. Madrigals in the garden, one summer evening – and a flight of steps, down from the patio, where the singing went on, into the darkness, at an angle that would not have been out of place on a Cornish cliff-face! Was it just the result of deep dissection by drainage as the geography textbooks would have it? Or, as I know for sure about the drop at the south-western corner of the main university campus, and suspect about other unexpected declines, was it a clay-pit? They dug out the earth for the footings, and piled it up, and turned it into bricks, and fired them in kilns on the site, and built the walls for the foundations, and followed the seam of brick-earth to build the rest of the houses… And that meant digging away a great deal, and that left a hole, which will, eventually, be filled up, with all kinds of stuff…

Let me finish this exploration of my past, and Southampton’s past, with my own understanding of what it’s all about. Unexpected links between one place and another. Patterns that persist. Building things out of what’s underneath you – and the way that that process leaves traces, which themselves absorb other random materials, and bring them, too, together, which may, I hope, make yet more connections…

Frome 17-21.vi.2020

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THE STRING QUARTET

THE STRING QUARTET

The two couples sit and listen. The sun sets slowly over the lake. The waves on it seem calmed by the music, glistening as the level light strokes them. The lake used to be a small gravel-pit, but no one who knows that mentions it.

The four players are happy, except for those moments when the music moves them to be sad. They look at one another when they need to. They are glad to be here, in these pleasant surroundings. The scent of jasmine steals in from the trellis by the veranda where they are sitting, playing music they love. If they have time, between their entries, they can steal a glance at the view over the lake, even though it is behind them.

The one they can see is reflected in the mirror above the fireplace. It is smaller, darker and further away than the one in reality behind them, but one cannot have everything. It is only right that the owner of the house and his guests should be able to enjoy the view while listening to the music. He has paid handsomely for all of it.

The players are happy with the money they will take away. They do not need to worry about where it has come from. A fine dinner is waiting for them. They smelt it being prepared as they came through the marble hallway into the summer salon – it is a small villa. They are also relieved that they will not have to make conversation with their employer – he calls himself their host – and his guests. He told them when he hired them that he respected their artistic independence, and understood their need to regain their own inner calm after the emotional stresses and strains of playing such a work. They did not contradict him.

They will eat well in the small dining-room, adjacent to the kitchen, where the staff, the cook and butler, will eat last of all, when dinner has been served and the host and his guests have expressed the desire to be left to their own devices. By then the players, dined and wined, will have made their way, instrument-laden, down the hill through the soft darkness to the gently glowing railway station, to catch the last but one train back to the city. There they will part, the second violinist to his young family in the suburbs, the viola-player to the large flat he still shares with his elderly mother, the cellist to the half-villa on the edge of the city that his wife inherited from her aunt, and the bachelor first violin to a game of cards and a few glasses of schnaps with his regular circle, not too far from his spacious and expensive apartment in the inner city.

They finish playing – and only just in time. It is a long work, and the sun has already set. There is only just enough light left to read the parts on the music-stands in front of them. The players are glad that the host has chosen to demonstrate his sense of culture by providing the stands. One thing less to carry. The first violin decides he should visit his friend the optician before the winter brings darker days. They hold the last chord together, flawlessly, because they have been playing together a while. The last vibrations die into silence. Their bows still rest on the strings. It is a kind of game. Will the listeners know when it is over? They are polite, or perhaps experienced, and wait till the players relax and lift their bows before even shifting their own positions. Even then, they do not applaud, but murmur appreciation. The players understand. Four people do not constitute an audience. They are individuals. The sound of breath released that has been retained is enough of a tribute.

One by one, the players stand and begin to pack away. As if by arrangement, the listeners move forward and mingle with them, trying not to disturb them in their activities, but each separately intent on having a word, commenting on a particular passage, expressing how moved, impressed, touched, even surprised they were by one particular moment. The players, though different in their characteristic movements, all essentially respond in the same way: a deprecating gesture with one hand or the other, an understanding nod of the head, a pinching of the mouth, a wrinkling of the lips, the sort of response made to the tasting of an unfamiliar wine, a recognition that different people have different tastes and that there is, in the long run, little point in discussing them, and none at all in contradicting them, which would only give offence.

The first violin, who has dealt with their host before in other contexts and to whom the approach was made which has led to this engagement, suspects strongly that their host has primed the other listeners, though he is not entirely certain why. Nor does he think that concerns him and his fellow-players. He nods away the comment being made in his ear with a convincing impersonation of agreement and appreciation and snaps his violin-case shut. Then he turns to his fellow-players, nods at them, just as he does when signalling an entry, and the quartet files past the listeners, who are lined up as if at some formal garden-party given by a figure of distinction, shaking hands down the line.

The host moves across and shuts the door leading to the hallway. Then he moves to open the door which leads into the large dining-room. Candles are already lit. Open windows admit the scent of jasmine. Barely-noticeable fly-screens exclude undesirable intruders, which occasionally flutter at them with a subdued drumming. Four places are set at the lake end of the long table. No one is seated at the head. The host directs his wife to sit opposite him, while the other couple are placed correspondingly, so that each man has a woman as his neighbour, as is normal in polite society.

“Did you enjoy it?” asks the host, as he pours the white wine. His wife covers her glass. He pours the wine himself because he does not believe in discussing things in front of servants. Besides, the cook will be busy serving the quartet. Moreover, he does not believe in mixing conversation with the appreciation of food. He is a great believer in distinction and separation. He will summon the dinner when he is ready.

It is the male guest who answers first. He is younger than the host, his hair is blonde and unruly, his skin pale, freckled, his eyes ice-blue, his teeth prominent and flashing.

“Well,” he says, “it’s not what I’m used to, it’s not perhaps my taste, but I can appreciate it.”

“Good,” says the host, sipping his wine, as he pours some sparkling mineral water for his wife. The wine is not quite cold enough. He replaces the bottle in the cooler and sprinkles some salt on the ice that surrounds it. “I like honesty.”

“I admire the skill,” says the male guest. “Even though it’s not something I’d wish to be able to do.”

“Oh yes,” says the guest’s wife, shifting on her chair with excitement, “the way their fingers flash up and down, always making different sounds and always getting it right! I couldn’t take my eyes off them!”

“Yes, they’re clever, Jewish fiddlers,” says the host’s wife, sipping her mineral water.

“Are they – all – ?” asks the male guest, turning to his host’s wife.

It is the host who answers him. “Yes. Does it matter?”

“Well – no – not really – if they’re good at what they do – ”

“And they clearly are,” says the host. “Your wife is very impressed with their capabilities.”

“Aren’t you?” asks the male guest, a little uncertain.

“Oh, yes,” says the host, laying his right hand on the left hand of the woman next to him, “I share many of your wife’s tastes. If not quite all of them.”

The guest’s wife looks at the host beside her in a way which suggests that she has looked at him many times before, in different circumstances. “No,” she says, smiling, and slipping her hand out from under his to adjust her dress, “not quite all. But most.” And she puts her hand back, on top of his.

“And you, my dear,” says the host to his wife, “what do you think? How did the performance strike you?”

The host’s wife dabs her lips with her napkin, leaving a little lipstick on it. She notices, and purses her lips in annoyance. “I think they stir up our emotions too much,” she says. “I don’t think they have any business doing that. A beautiful melody is one thing. Anyone can enjoy that. You don’t have to sing along, or march to it, or dance to it, or bellow it out at the top of your voice over a whole orchestra scraping and puffing away. You can appreciate it inside yourself. But those harmonies, those sliding, slipping ambiguities, those places where you can’t be quite sure whether you’re dealing with pain or pleasure – to me, they are signs of sickness, inner sickness. And worst of all is that people should make their living by doing that kind of thing. Bad enough that they can’t help it themselves – but to encourage it, to parade it publicly, to call it art! People like that are spreading it like a disease.”

She drains her mineral water in one go, as if she wants to wash away the taste of the words she has just had to take into her mouth. Her husband sits and looks at her for a moment, then reaches a little awkwardly with his left hand, his right still being occupied, to grasp the bottle of mineral water and refill her glass.

“My wife,” says the host, “is extremely forthright in her opinions. I cannot say that I share them, but I see what she means.”

“And yourself, sir?” asks the male guest, toying with his empty wine-glass.

“Ah,” says the host, “let me, before I speak, refill your glass – I fear I have been remiss in my duties.” He frees his right hand, pours for the guest’s wife, the guest, and himself. His own wife drinks off her mineral water, and pushes her glass forward. He fills that, too, though he needs to take another bottle from the cooler to do so, but the cork comes out easily.

“I appreciate a string quartet for its organisation,” he says.

“Do you mean the music, or the group of players?” asks the male guest.

“Both,” says the host, moving his wine-glass so he can use his left hand to drink from it. His right hand twines its fingers round those of the guest’s wife, and the two hands lie together on the table as one. “In the music, it is that integration of apparently disparate emotions which appeals to me especially – just as it appals my wife. There is an added piquancy in the juxtaposition of pain and pleasure. The presence of each reminds one of just what there is to appreciate in the other.”

The male guest nods, as if to suggest that he understands. But his eyes indicate that he does not – at least, as far as his own emotions are concerned.

“At the level of performance,” continues the host, “I am fascinated by the way that the members of a quartet respond to one another, defer, make way, appreciate dominance and submission, while acknowledging that every one of them is necessary for the functioning of the whole. There is none of that crude striving after equality – rather, there is recognition that everyone has their place, and that the right thing to do is to be content with that, especially if those who have the greater importance and therefore the greater responsibility pay due tribute to those whose positions are lesser and lower, but equally vital. By saying which, of course, I am paying tribute to those who cook for us and those who serve us, and whose patience I shall now reward.”

The bell is within reach of his left hand. Dinner begins. Hands are separated. Conversation is limited to reflections on the food. More wine is poured. Different wines are brought and consumed. Plates are removed. Servants are formally dismissed. The host rises.

“My wife, I know, is weary,” he says, “and you – ,” he indicates the male guest, “were at work early this morning, and must catch the very last train back to be at your desk in the morning, but your charming wife has consented to stay overnight, not least to enjoy the rising of the sun, and see how it colours our lake. We shall have to walk round to the other side, to see how it rises above this house.”

Those who have been dismissed, depart. They know their places. There is a small room, just off the dining-room, called a cabinet, which contains two chairs, a table and a couch, provided for just such an occasion as this. It is used for the purpose for which it was designed and intended – that, in itself, is part of the pleasure, the host thinks. One must not confuse things. Only one person can possibly sleep on the couch. And then, only during the day. Robes are hung on the back of the door. There is no need for the messy process of dressing again after the delights of undressing. Discreet servants will restore the necessary order in the morning.

Alone, as, in a sense, he always is, the host reflects. This is the coda, in which themes are reviewed and their implications explored. What, he wonders, will eventually become of the string quartet, or rather its players? Will they survive the changes that are to come? Do they need to? They have produced beauty and piquancy for him. Their function has been fulfilled. Once you have the honey, do you still need the bees?

Before he goes to bed, he wants some fresh air. He extinguishes the candles. There is moonlight. He lets up one of the fly-screens and breathes in deeply. Almost at once, a large moth flies in. His reactions are quick. He has it by one wing. It flutters. He holds it tight while it does so and looks at it. It is very beautiful. But it is in the wrong place. He crushes it in his hand and drops the tattered remnant on the floor. Someone else can clear it up. He knows his place, and for now it is bed.

The good thing about music, he reflects as he goes up the stairs, is that you always know when it is over.

Frome, 12.00-15.00, 07.vi.2020