I AM WRITING about a place which I have never seen and which I know by heart: gently sloping parkland falling to a stream, with the fields on the other side of the valley bright with new grass. It is one of the coloured drawings (technically limited, even amateur, but eloquent in their love and sorrow) which John Aubrey (1626–97) made of his family house, grounds and farmland at Easton Piers, near Kington St Michael in Wiltshire. He may have begun by testing a perspective device for landscape drawing, at some point before-and-after fantasies of an Italianate recasting of house and garden entered the series, but the sequence of drawings seemed to change purpose and atmosphere about halfway through. The change almost certainly came at the point when Aubrey realised that his inheritance was going to be dispersed because of the lawsuits which had ruined him at the age of forty-four. Once he knew that everything was going to be sold, his purpose altered to the making of a series of tender records of the estate as is was in reality, a series of captured moments and places from the April of the year 1670.
This loss called forth from him an intensity of identification with place. Depth of feeling is embedded in these coloured drawings, a sense of devotion to the sheep-cropped slopes and small, stream-scoured upland valleys. Memory inhabits their coppices, stone shelters and field gates, as well as their grand, cloudy Wiltshire distances, recessions of wooded ridges seen at evening from the high ground behind the house. There is an intensity here which transcends aesthetic limitations: a fragile, personal set of notations set down in the pocket drawing book – a portable memory book for a landless, migratory future. This can be felt in Aubrey’s notes in the margins: ‘my grandfather Lyte’s chamber wherin I drew my first breath’, ‘a thin blew landscape’. What is recorded by his careful, unsophisticated work is a kind of memoir of youth and young manhood, a history of walking the fields, dog at heel, year after year, combined with an exceptional degree of natural observation.
It is this passion and closeness of observation which are extraordinary, seeming to belong less to the era when the drawings were made, than to the intense relation to English place which marks the years after the 1780s. Some of the drawings even speak to times and moods nearer to our own, wholly unlike the formalities of the estate and prospect poems which were the seventeenth-century ways of writing about landscape. The last drawing is sepia monochrome, a haunting prospect eastwards across fertile, well-wooded land towards the spire of Kington St Michael, the church school where Aubrey had his first education. A spring rain shower is passing over from the south, the trees and hedges are in leaf. The little figure of Aubrey is walking away from his lost inheritance, a stick over his shoulder. His dog Fortune, running ahead of him, turns back to look up at his master. Mine now, his tomorrow, after that nobody knows whose, is the English version of the motto which Aubrey wrote on the title page of this little book of drawings.
On this overcast late-winter afternoon, the sheets of paper which Aubrey carried around the Wiltshire field paths in the blue spring days of 1670 lie on the table in front of me in the Weston Library, part of the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, the university which Aubrey attended until the civil wars put an end to his studies. He remained associated with Oxford all his life, and is buried somewhere in the church of St Mary Magdalene, at the other end of Broad Street from the Library, four minutes away. Little of his work was printed in his lifetime, so the manuscripts now in Oxford are his real legacy. In their varying degrees, all of these manuscripts of Aubrey’s are beguilingly unfinished – a disordered, mysterious and poetic world of jottings about people and places and inventions and anecdotes and rumours and hauntings and antiquities. Inevitably every reader is sooner or later seduced by the feeling that if only these fragments could be deciphered (the hand is difficult, the papers dishevelled) and set in order, then the past would somehow be all but tangible and the voices of the dead would speak at the frontiers of our hearing, their shadows linger at the other door as we come into the room. You don’t know Aubrey as a writer: you are drawn into knowing him as a collaborator in his great unfinished, unfinishable work. In a curious sense, he remains our contemporary, as though he is in some way still alive, out there in the green south-western quadrant of England, kept in being by the seductive incompleteness of his work. Thus, reading him makes you somehow his contemporary, or him yours. It is a strange, satisfying, sleep-troubling, dream-invading, unique relationship. (Part of the success of the recent, peerless edition of Aubrey’s Brief Lives is its subtle assent to this process.)
The manuscript is on the table in front of me, the grey and white stripes of my shirt cuff are beside it where Aubrey’s own hand must often have rested. I work with such things regularly, and have grown almost insensitive to the way that manuscript brings you into physical contact with the past and its inhabitants, the way that the individuality of a script long outlives the hand which shaped it. But Aubrey’s works, and especially this manuscript, where he has dared to commit such defenceless love to the page, is an exceptional object which compels you to think of its paper as a contact with Aubrey, paper which has rested on his knee at the end of a field path. We are still aware of his hand under-drawing the scenes in the brownish ink of the seventeenth century, then setting the colours of coppice and sky, his brush hand hovering carefully just where my hand is now above the page as I turn to the twelfth leaf of the little bound book.
I gaze long and carefully at the saddest and most powerful of the drawings: we are looking down a sparsely wooded slope to a small stone building with a mono-pitch roof – some sort of cattle shelter or ‘sheep house’. A hedge runs along the bottom of the valley, hinting at the presence of a stream. Another hedge divides the coppice from a field of grass to the right, entered by a wooden field gate. At the bottom of this field here are shadings and monochrome brushstrokes which outline small rocks breaking the surface of the grass.
Green slopes rise gently on the other side of the water. The more you look the more you see: a strong line of vertical light lies on the right-hand side of the tree trunks as if the sun is now low in the sky, shooting light along the valley. I think that it is growing cold as evening draws on. The tree shadows are strongly patterned on the ground. The under-drawing is in sepia ink, which shows through now-fading watercolour almost like the prefiguration of the autumn which will follow the partings to come. The brownish colouration dominates the page, for all that the sky is very blue. A green pigment must have faded from the sloping field on the other side of the valley, which once must have been bright with new grass. As the colour has gone, the hedgerows have dimmed and umbered. It is spring on the page, but the day is ending, and the shadows cast by the trees grow very long. You half catch Aubrey’s murmur: Nunc mea, mox huius, sed postea nescio cuius. He must have gathered up his brushes and colours as the sun dipped below the horizon and, calling his dog to him – Fortune, Fortune – set off up the hill.
I take a last look at the sloping field in the westering sun, and turn the pages gently for one more glance at the sepia drawing of Aubrey and Fortune walking away into the green April evening. I close the manuscript, put on my jacket, hand the little oblong book in at the issue desk, then go downstairs and out through the peaceful, enormous hall. It is dark now and the evening air strikes with a chill like water on the skin. Bicycles whisper swiftly through the dusk. Opposite is the golden stone ensemble of theatre, museum and the endearing provincial baroque of the stone piers crowned by giant heads of the Roman emperors (I wish I could have seen this ‘ragged regiment’ in their ‘wonderful state of decomposition’ in the mid twentieth century1). These contrast with the stark grandeur of Hawksmoor’s Clarendon building, which is tough and melancholy and belligerent all at once. Blackened lead statues of the Muses patrol the roofline – pitiless executives of success and genius and fame. Fortune, Fortune.
I start to walk home along Broad Street, past the closed gates and the concert posters. I glance across to Trinity, Aubrey’s college, sitting far behind its screen of railings, beyond lawns and trees, like a country house. I turn south into Turl Street – in the panelled front room of the Turl Street Kitchen the first customers are eating an early supper by candlelight. Streetlamps and college windows shimmer dimly on damp flagstones. Now the smart shops pass: jeweller, bootmaker, dandy’s tailor, whisky shop with its window full of names from the uplands around the house where I once lived in Aberdeenshire. Light strikes upwards to the brass chandeliers and high stucco ceiling of the church turned library on the corner. Fortune, Fortune.
I cross the High Street at the lights. Then down bricky Albert Street, round the corner by the Bear, where the lamplight is playing on the polished wood in the bar. Out into St Aldate’s and threading through the crowds at the bus stops – the buses for Wantage and Abingdon, setting off into the damp night and through the lighted villages. I walk down past the front of Christ Church, Wren’s Gothic tower high above me, through the breath of wood smoke from the pizza van at the college gate, and across the wide road. Brewer Street is dim, sheltered by the bulwark of the old city wall, by Pembroke’s high buildings. The main road falls behind with every step, more removed still as I push open the outer door of Campion Hall and slide the tab against my name to IN.
I think that only in this college are there three choices: IN or OUT or AWAY. (Given the early history of the Jesuits in Britain it is hard not to associate AWAY with phrases like gone beyond the seas, or fled to his kinsfolk in the North.) Fortune, Fortune. A smell of polish and flowers and good, careful cooking. Past the great polychrome and gold carving of Ignatius and his companions, through the dim dining room (with habitual glances at the weekly menu, and at Augustus John’s nervous, brilliant portrait of Fr Martin D’Arcy). Through the lobby with its paintings from Flanders and Peru, and into the library. Panelling above the broad stone fireplace, books from floor to ceiling, pools of light under the standard lamps. The room is profoundly still, and this quiet house grows quieter at evening. It is almost as though it grew more remote, when the lamps are lit in the library and the fire in the common room. It becomes like a manor house, silent at evening, remote and westerly and enfolded by wooded hills. The buds of the birch tree rustle in the dark like the gentlest rain. And I am thinking of John Aubrey, still walking away northwards through the green land, the shower over, the drops glistening on new hawthorn leaves, dog Fortune dancing at his heels down the green lane.
1. The state of the Emperors before renovation is described by Nikolaus Pevsner in Jennifer Sherwood and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (Penguin, 1974) p. 256. He borrowed the phrase ‘ragged regiment’ from William Morris who borrowed it in turn from the traditional description of the royal waxworks in Westminster Abbey.