Those artists were masters of the soul and eye and the place: they taught you how to see, just because they never spoke. Was there such a crispness in the air, in Norfolk or in Northumberland two hundred years ago? Did I really see for myself the yellow and the green leaves yesterday in a pool of light, or had Cotman taught me speechlessly to see them?1
If I had not lingered over those landscapes in the museum at Norwich longer than I should have done that June afternoon a few years ago, we would have driven into the worst onslaught of one of the greatest storms in decades. We had spent a few days in Cotman’s own landscape, in an old house between Norwich and Yarmouth, in the shelter of broad, deep-shaded trees, with glimpses through to the wide, brilliant sky over fields full of standing grain. I had walked with our host to their stone-flagged church to see the fading diaper on the screen, lit by greenish light falling through leaves and very old glass. A sudden and tremendous thunderstorm had surprised us while we were sitting in their kitchen near Norwich: it is only the second time in my life that I have seen a genuinely black sky. The empty Tudor gallery on the top floor of the house has grisaille wall-paintings gone almost to shadows: charcoal forests hunted by ghost hounds. A whisper and hint remain of what might have been there. Diamond lettering on an old window-pane, with the sky looming beyond: ghosts are a poet’s working capital.
The thunderstorm had come and gone, leaving the wet leaves in the lanes brilliant in the returning sun. After this, not to have gone back to the watercolours in Norwich, to rejoice in that territory where recollected landscape and Cotman’s instructing eye become one, would have seemed a chance frivolously thrown away.
We had planned a diagonal route from Norfolk across the Wash towards the A1 and the north. Setting off late, in mid-afternoon, we only caught the fringes of the storm, but those were daunting enough. We were driving north-west under the shifting towers of slate and violet in the vast sky over the Lincolnshire Levels, with absolute blackness beyond them. Sparks of white drops rebounding off the tarmac, the road surface stirring into ripples and folds of water. The air itself thickened and dimmed with spray cast up into the obliterating rain.
On either side of the causeway through the marshes, the willows had turned to phantoms of themselves, the silver undersides of their leaves shining with the streaming water which twisted them and bore them down. Every time that the road crossed one of the great drainage-canals – each one usually a channel of gleaming mud stretching straight to the horizon – it was fuller and fuller with opaque, muddied water. The ring roads of the fenland towns were awash, with currents cross-hatching the surface of the water at every roundabout.
Yet, between one moment and the next, we drove across an invisible frontier in the geography of the storm and into a drenched stillness: water running away down the banks at the sides of the road, flickering afternoon sun on saturated grass. Bright drip and dazzle in the drops that were falling in a mimicked rainstorm from leaf to leaf within every soaking tree. The towers of the marshland churches showed clear again against a torn and uncertain sky.
We came into Stamford as if we were coming safe into a walled city in a time of violence, out of perilous outlands, and were astonished to see people strolling with their dogs to the park gates of Burghley House, as though this were any normal day. Although the air was damp as we crossed the walled garden of the hotel, there was a gentle warmth in the late afternoon and the gravel underfoot was almost dry, glittering still with traces of a lighter rain. A group of handsome and well-dressed young people was passing quietly through the hall of the hotel as though to an annual dinner. When we came down from our room and out into the early evening, the streets of pale yellow stone held the sun, and the air was quite still.
From the windows of the restaurant by the river we could see the great town meadows stretching away. Runners in the middle distance on the towpath, a group of men in cricket sweaters practising throwing and catching on the grass, all beneath a sky serene in the foreground but turning black in the fastnesses of the west. But low sunlight still lay across the fields, and it was only when we looked down from the bridge that we saw the troubling force of the river, its darkened waters running high and very fast and fraught with wreckage from elsewhere, from places where the violence of the storm was mounting still.
The streets and squares through which we strolled had a gentle stir of life in them: groups of people walking to the theatre, parents and children setting out from a Georgian front door, formally dressed as if for a school concert. The whole town seemed settled and beautiful and calm. A chandelier seen through the windows of the Assembly Rooms; fine architectural books in the window of a closed antiquarian bookshop, a shop remembered from student expeditions many years ago.
We passed along street after street of houses, their masonry the washed-gold of barley-straw, seeing fine detail after fine detail, all periods drawn into unity by the uniform colour of the stone. As we turned into the broad street leading up to St Martin’s church, I began to feel an unexpected, inexplicable sense of peace, a gift of the level evening light and of feeling at home in the place, with its people walking quietly with us. Apart from the sense that the town itself was offering us its protection, there was a sense that that the people were using the town to the full, enjoying it as much as the citizens of any southern European city.
I glanced into a silent bar parlour, as quiet as thirty years ago, with a church or allotment committee working through its business at the table by the window. A group of plainly dressed middle-aged men and women; half pints and glasses of wine amongst papers with columns of figures, and an atmosphere of friendliness and co-operation, smiling figures leaning forward, fingers resting on points of interest in the papers on the table.
There was nobody in the street when we reached the top of the slope where the buildings stop at the park wall. The last substantial house had become a small hotel, with not a single guest in the old-fashioned dining room of starched tablecloths and folded napkins. Two young waiters were lounging in chairs by the window. One had opened the front of his white shirt to the waist to show off the result of his visits to the gym. His fair hair fell forward on his forehead, he flicked it out of his eyes and they were both laughing.
We turned and the full beauty of the High Street was displayed: running straight downhill, with the spire of St Martin’s reaching up into a sky which had turned to slate and muted blue. Small rain began to fall as the light faded. We passed a tall uncurtained house like a watchtower on the way down. Its rooms were unexpected survivals of the 1970s: Indian bedcovers, printed with carnation gardens, hanging against midnight-coloured walls. Lights were going on in all the windows now, showing pale panelling, rooms of fine joinery. Seldom have I felt such a sense of calm engendered by place. The unwonted sense of peace grew with every step of our gentle perambulation of this town on the far side of the floods. Absolute quietude in the eye of the storm.
The journey northward the next day was governed by the waters washing across England, so that we were driven off the blocked and flooded A1 and onto branching minor roads, B roads which had once been the cart tracks between villages, above the waterline. Rounding one hill on this improvised route, we came on an English capriccio of a haunting, random beauty. A little brick and Portland stone pavilion on a hillside – a banqueting house, a folly – was mirrored in the great sheet of a temporary, serpentine lake which filled the broad valley and glimmered in front of monumental cooling towers in the middle distance.
When eventually we turned north-west at Piercebridge, onto the A68, we felt happily ashore in upland Britain, rising in calm onto the flank of the Pennines, safe on Roman roads. Passing the sign marking the county boundary of Yorkshire seemed a moment of disproportionate significance, as though only safety and the hills lay ahead after the drenched lowlands and swollen watercourses. Slabs of afternoon sun broke through slate-blue clouds over the slopes above Corbridge. Light from a transparent sky moulded the smooth grassy hills just over the Scottish border, those rounded hills which seem otherworldly on first sight, after the slow climb through conifers and shaggy moorland past the great reservoir and out of Northumberland. Jedburgh, Scottish voices at the garage, then red stone houses among red fields. The long, subtle curve of the high street of Lauder, the cottages on the shoulder of the hill at Pathhead; and then the deep, old trees fold in a tunnel over the road and we slow down, watching for the war memorial which marks the turn onto the minor road which leads to our friends’ house.
As soon as you turn off the old main road, you enter into comparative silence, birdsong, the noise of the wind. You pass fine stone farmhouses, eighteenth-century, early nineteenth-century – the restraint and skill which built the New Town of Edinburgh rippling out into the surrounding countryside. Green blades rising in the fields. And then a hidden turning – a break in the thorn hedge and into a deep lane, its surface a little uneven, and the hedges rising on either side, tree branches meeting above it. Everything becoming slower and calmer as we pass through bars of shadow and light along this track cut deep into the barley fields: a sense of moving from one region to another, into the quiet of the past and into the heart of the summer.
In the hall of the stone house, the tick of the longcase clock itself slows and calms the air and the smell of the garden lilies on the hall table hangs as heavily as a mist. It is just before midsummer and the sun hardly descends in the sky until after dinner, when we drift out into the garden – the whole company, our hosts and two of their daughters just home from university. We walk away from the house, further and further, moving from mown grass to strimmed grass, and then rhododendrons narrow in on either side as we reach the gap in the trees where the long path leads through the woods. In below the canopy of deciduous trees, the shadows are green and the air is dim.
There is a path of dry grass through the underwood, the prodigal, extraordinary growth of ferns which seem to flourish especially in the Scottish Lowlands. I say that it would have been on such a path and in such green twilight that Thomas the Rhymer would have met the Queen of the Otherworld. (The unearthly light of four in the morning in Scotland in June is awfully like the underworld light ‘neither sun nor moon’ of the ballad.) Both daughters are agreeably spooked by the thought and we start to talk about Rossetti’s painting of a couple meeting their doubles at the corner of a path in a twilight wood just like this one. Its title alone is unsettling – How They Met Themselves – and any narrative that you can imagine to match the image can only be a dark one.
So we start to spin a tale of terror around ourselves as we walk happily through the summer wood and the gentle air. Suppose that such a party had set out from such a house on such a night as this, and had walked on and onwards through the soft ferns and the flicker of leaves, and suppose it had grown later and later and they had finally turned for home (as we have now done) and that the house comes into view at the very end of the long path through the trees. But suppose as they come closer that they begin to see something unfamiliar about the house, something as small as the inexplicable growth of a creeper. They slow their pace as they become more and more certain that time has played them false and that the walk in the wood has filled not hours but years, and that when they come out from the trees they will find to their horror what has happened to their house; what has happened to them. Terrified (up to a point) we come back to be greeted by nothing more daunting than the Norfolk terrier who has been dozing on the doorstep.
A dreamy few days follow. We have allowed ourselves an extra night or two before we all go together to a wedding – for once in adult life, there is nothing in particular to do beyond offering due help in the house and garden. We have known the family for so long that there is nothing to explain or negotiate. In retrospect, these days seem far longer than they were, and slip into a version of an earlier stage of all our lives with fewer distractions and fewer responsibilities. The two daughters have become witty and forceful young women, almost Shakespearean in their country setting of the quiet garden shading off into woods on all sides.
One evening after supper, I walk with my goddaughter to a pool under the dark of the trees over the lane, where a spring rises and mint grows. We gather a few leaves to make mint tea. It is quite still under the trees, the sky is luminous over the invisible river to the north, and it feels as if all the farmlands of Lothian are folded around us, keeping us safe. Despite much new building and the roaring presence of the Edinburgh bypass, the feeling of a distinctively Scottish pastoral still survives in parts of the Lothians, in the gentle slope of the landscape, with the Pentlands to the south and the broad estuary of the Forth to the north. Summer in this landscape is described in one of the strangest of Scottish Renaissance poems, Alexander Hume’s ‘Of the Day Estivall’, strange because in late sixteenth-century Scotland, a society sombre in outlook and allegorical in literary habit, the poem is purely descriptive of one of the rare days of real heat in the Lowland summer.2
Hume’s poem is uncharacteristically serene in its enjoyment of the season: it is very rare among poems of the time of the Scottish Reformation in its compete lack of religious introspection. Each elegant quatrain fixes one visual image, a classic procedure of a northern Renaissance mind, the emblem-culture of picture and idea, the steady move from one easily memorised image to another. The simple organising principle of the poem is the progress of the day from sunrise to sunset.
The location is still recognisable: the small towns reflect the sunlight back from their whitewashed walls. The gentle slope of the fields towards the sea and the harbours is scattered with the small mansion houses and castles. Hills waver in the haze on the other side of the Firth. The verses proceed by the accretion of acute observations. Long views into the hills, the stillness of the small waves on the shore, farm animals seeking the shade, swarming bees in ‘knots’, the reflection of heat from the whinstone cobbles, the noontide meal of watered wine and salad and oil, fruit ripening against the walls of the gardens.
The stable ships upon the sea
Tend up their sails to dry.
With late afternoon the heat abates, shadows stretch out, and smoke stands up straight in the air:
The shade of every tower and tree
Extended is in length.
Great is the calm, for everywhere
The wind is setten down;
The reek thraws right up in air
From every tower and town.
The evening throws heraldic tinctures (‘pourpour sanguine’) on the clouds, scattering them with rubies and roses. Fishing, and the observation of the reflections of the trees in the motionless river, are the pleasures of the fading light:
What pleasure were to walk and see,
Endlang a river clear,
The perfite form of every tree
Within the deep appear.
The day ends with a consort of voices and wind instruments praising God for the perfection of the summer day.
I had passed one or two such days a few years earlier, in a sixteenth-century house near Edinburgh: sitting working in the shade of the trees in the walled garden, the limewashed walls too bright for the eye at noon, the summer’s fruit ripening already against them. My godson Jamie, then a very little child, sang (or at least ululated happily) as he was carried up the spiral stairs to bed; and after he was asleep, my host and I sang and played the piano in the evening cool of the long room on the top floor. We sang mostly songs with words by Burns in the old settings in which they were first published, the sparse accompaniments allowing the flawless placing of the words to tell. From one window you could see to the citadel of Edinburgh, from another the sea. One evening we simply broke off, both caught right off guard by the sheer perfection of the line, I can die but canna part.
It was to the same house that we all returned at the end of the week for a wedding, which strikes me in retrospect as like a masque. It was a huge collective effort to which almost every guest had contributed in kind – making something, contributing music or skill, spending days on the garden – and the result was genuinely beautiful. A version of reality, heightened and transfigured, rather than a fantasy. There was one moment of absolute magic at the end standing in the twilight of midnight in the garden with Janey and our two oldest friends with lights in all the top-floor windows and the fiddles striking up for the dances in the marquee behind us. Two slender and handsome young armigers were standing at a distance in the shadows of the trees, in white shirts and red kilts (they’d taken their jackets off for the reels) looking like the most elegant double portrait Raeburn should have painted but never did. And then north the next day by Glenshee and the long road through Braemar and Ballater and then over Strathdon and down into the plains and home. Buzzard and swallow were describing intersecting, counterpoint circles over the green fields of barley under the endless light of evening. Bennachie was riding the horizon in dusty light, looking like the Apennines, and the sun cast a red glow upwards into the clouds on the northern horizon all through midsummer night.