It can’t be a favourite place unless you have been happy there. The place I want to describe is the village of Milton Abbot—but at this point there’s an interruption. Everyone says they know it well, but it turns out they mean Milton Abbas, in Dorset. Milton Abbot, in west Devon, six miles northwest of Tavistock and just next to Cornwall, is a village that guidebooks neglect. It is a village built on a slope—the south side draws its water from the mains, the north side gets it from springs—and sheltering round a noble fifteenth-century church, St Constantine’s. This church is built of the beautiful local Hurdwick stone, green in colour—‘underwater green,’ it has been called.
At the end of the churchyard there is a steep drop, with a flight of stone steps, down to the Green, the centre of all things for Milton Abbot’s not very many young children. This is an echoing green, as in Blake’s vision, and when it darkens the last game of three-a-side football trails into silence.
In fact, Milton Abbot is never a noisy place, though I should perhaps make an exception of the rooks, whose voices are much louder than the children’s. The village has been lucky enough to keep all its English elms, and the rookery with them. The lane at the bottom crosses a stream which until a year ago used to run over it, and for a hundred yards or so after that, from spring until autumn, there is a display of wildflowers, not rare, but spectacular even for Devon: primroses, violets, stitchwort, red campion. To the west, beyond the elms, the view opens towards the Cornish moors, scattered with rocks.
I go there to visit my daughter, my son-in-law, and their three young children. They live in a cottage with honeysuckle at one side of the front door and a rose at the other (although this is not really good soil for roses). The kitchen, built out at the back, looks out over green pastures.
The new tiles on the kitchen roof have been known to leak, the old ones are stalwart. As the children get taller, the cottage gets smaller, and it’s agreed, and has been agreed for some time, that the family is on the verge of moving. Meanwhile, they are not only prepared to sleep on the floor when visitors arrive, but give the impression that they prefer it. The garden, by a legal compromise made too long ago to be disentangled, is 150 yards away from the cottage. It is large enough to accommodate a precarious shed and an apple tree—glorious apples that foam more meltingly than any Bramley when they are cooked (though 1993 was not a good year). What kind they are I don’t know, perhaps Grenadiers. There are hundreds of anonymous kinds of apple planted, mostly in Victorian days, in the numberless orchards of Devon.
It doesn’t take long to walk around Milton Abbot—much longer, though, if you’re interested, as I am, in Edwardian architecture. To the north side of the Green (not our side) it has the distinction of being largely designed by Lutyens. Seven centuries ago, the village and its surrounding cow-pastures belonged to the Abbey of Tavistock. It was transferred by Henry VIII, with the rest of the monks’ property, to the Earls and Dukes of Bedford. In 1908—09—by which time the village had still not changed hands—the then Duke of Bedford commissioned Lutyens to lay out new estate cottages. At this period, nearly everyone in Milton Abbot except the baker and the undertaker worked at Endsleigh, another of the Bedford properties. They walked the two miles to work every morning across the fields.
Lutyens, at that date, had not reached his grand manner. He was still thought of as a sound Arts and Crafts man who a couple of years earlier had done a row of model thatched cottages for labourers at Ashby St Ledgers, near Daventry. The early twentieth century was in fact the end of two hundred years of English model-village building, undertaken, as John Betjeman put it, ‘with the best intentions, and a conscious effort to provide better living conditions.’
Meanwhile, Lutyens had established for himself a Ruskinian moral truth in architecture that implied natural, local materials and a responsibility to the site itself. Elsewhere in Devon this might have meant cob and thatch, but here the material to hand was the familiar green Hurdwick stone, with slate roofing. In the early 1900s Devon produced plenty of graded slates (they have to be imported now from Wales) and, since Tavistock had three times in its history burnt to the ground, a number of the farmers had already begun to prefer slate.
If you look round the village you will see at once how Lutyens’s favourite hipped roofs are exactly suited to the plunging sweep of the Green, while the square chimney stacks—reasonably low for an Arts and Crafts man—stand out against the open sky like a modest echo of the church tower itself. The cottages are not all on the same plan. They varied not only with the levels of the ground, but the status of the tenants. But estate workers could count on two to four bedrooms, parlour, kitchen, scullery, fuel store, covered access to the lavatories, and a good bit of garden. ‘I hate squalid houses and mean gardens,’ Lutyens wrote to his wife in 1909, and here he has certainly solved his problems without meanness. Milton Abbot, however, is a Devon village without cream teas, without a pottery, and without bed-and-breakfast. There is one pub, the Edgcumbe Arms (Lutyens wanted to add an inn in keeping with his cottages, but the duke turned down the idea). Here they welcome visitors, but can’t put them up.
They may well suggest that you try Tavistock. To Milton Abbot, Tavistock is the metropolis. Plymouth and Exeter are for major expeditions, but Tavistock is, for example, where the schools are. Probably the boys and girls at St Peter’s Primary School never notice, while they’re there, that every time they go in and out they can see Dartmoor stretching away to the horizon under a changing sky. But I would think that they will remember it for life.
Tavistock lies on the banks of the river Tavy, more on the north bank than the south. The valley is so steep that some of the houses have an iron staircase to connect them with their gardens. In the 1840s, the then Duke of Bedford had the town remodelled into open, airy, sturdy, mid-Victorian gothic—an impressive, greenish, gothic Guildhall; a fine, greenish, gothic Bedford Hotel; a covered market. (Hurdwick stone, incidentally, weathers well, but if restoration is necessary the citizens watch narrowly to see that the builders are working faithfully and not, for instance, using green-tinted cement.)
The duke was building over the site of the old abbey, but bits of it were left as picturesque ruins, as they still are. The porch of the misericord is at the back of the Bedford Hotel; the main gateway of the abbey—considerably patched up—is in Guildhall Square; part of the ancient walls still runs along the banks of the river. The Tavy, which means so much to the town, was brimming and foaming over its weir when I last saw it in December.
Charles I is supposed to have said that whatever else was uncertain in this world, it was sure to be raining in Tavistock. In this he was ungrateful to his loyal supporters in the West Country. Tavistock has an average seventy-five inches, but Princetown, fourteen hundred feet up on the moors, has over one hundred inches, with wind and fog.
Even so, there are people who make their way there precisely in the hope of fog. I am thinking of the Poor Folk Upon the Moors, a society based in the southwest and entirely devoted to studying the stories of Sherlock Holmes. They were up there last Christmas, in the Hound of the Baskervilles country, wearing deerstalkers and gaiters, to offer dinner to the prison governor. They saw nothing but beauty in what poor Watson called in his diary ‘the dreary curves of the moor, with thin silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces.’ But then, Watson had an altogether unfortunate experience of Devon.
To return to welcoming Tavistock—the whole town seems to stand under the protection of its two bronze statues, of the Duke and of Francis Drake, its favourite son. Drake, with his compasses, is on the Plymouth road—the statue on Plymouth Hoe is a replica. (For some reason both statues have recently been given a coating of what looks like chocolate, but it seems that this will weather down.)
Behind the main square, in a building paved with granite setts from Pew Tor, the Pannier Market takes place on Fridays and sometimes on other days.
Permission to hold it was granted in 1105, and I suppose it was a great place then as now for cheese, gingerbread, bacon, and dress lengths. These days it deals not only in craftwork and handmade jewellery but a profusion of little glass and china and silver-plated or even silver objects which make you feel, in the teeth of experience, that today you are going to pick up a bargain. Occasionally you do. But the Pannier Market’s speciality is half-price must-haves—Ghostbusters, Visionaries (remember them?), Thundercats, Subbuteo, Gladiators—secondhand, but in good condition, the antique toys of the future. Tavistock, then, is the place where we make good the distressing losses and gaps in my grandchildren’s collections. Where else do we take them, bearing in mind that they are too young as yet for the superb walks and trails across the moors? The National Park Authority provides all the information needed to cross Dartmoor’s granite back, but there are a few much shorter and much more modest expeditions.
Wellingtons, however, and a complete change of pretty well everything will probably be needed, as there is almost always water to get wet in. Endsleigh, the estate where the population of Milton Abbot used to work, is about two miles out of the village. The elaborate ‘cottage’—in fact a large villa—was an indulgence of Georgina, wife of the (sixth) Duke of Bedford. Sir Jeffry Wyatville designed it, with ornamental gables and its own Swiss Cottage, in 1810, while Humphrey Repton was given a free hand with the gardens. These two had a site in a thousand on a steep hillside overlooking the Tamar, which divides Devon from Cornwall. Repton, who aimed at creating an earthly paradise, combined nature and art, intertwining real branches and trunks with branches of stone. Endsleigh is now a fishing hotel. But when, in 1955, the Bedford family had to sell their paradise, the Endsleigh Trust ensured that the grounds should be open to the public on summer Sundays. Once a year, too, the right of way is open beside the riverbank. You walk from beautiful Greystone Bridge as far as End-sleigh. You can stop for a picnic, or go on to Horsebridge. If the children want to see the Dartmoor ponies close up, a good place is Pennycomequick, just outside Tavistock on the Princetown road, where you can park off the road on the edge of the moor.
If the sight of the tors gives them an uncontrollable desire to run downhill, we go to Double Waters. Take the Plymouth road out of Tavistock and, opposite the cemetery, turn down an unpromising lane which looks as though it leads to an industrial estate. It ends at a cattle grid, and beyond that is open moor where everyone can run straight down the valley where the Walkham and the Tavy meet. Persuading them to walk up the hill again is, of course, a different matter.
The place to go if the children want to climb is Pew Tor. Drive out of Tavistock on the Princetown road as far as Moortown and you will see it on the other side of a stream. Anyone can go up it without difficulty and stand at the top in the great washes of air, looking for miles across the two counties. Apart from the climb, there is a chance of finding among the boulders, half hidden in cotton grass and heather, one of the curious objects that I stumbled across on a recent visit. They are tin canisters, each with its own seal; what they are for, who puts them there and moves them secretly around West Dartmoor is a mystery.
A ritual is, however, growing up around them: if you have been careful to bring an ink pad and notebook, you can take an impression of the seal and record the date and place, then put the canister back in its hiding place.
Sometimes we take the Tavistock-to-Okehampton road and turn left at Mary Tavy. Between Peter Tavy and Mary Tavy—both once copper-mining villages, now silent—there is a track leading down through oak trees to a bridge across the Tavy.
You can sit here by the golden-brown water, watching it divide round the granite rocks in its bed, or you can paddle or go a little way across on the stepping stones. There is no particular need to cross the bridge. This must be one of Devon’s most undemanding expeditions, but it’s the one I remember most clearly of all, between summer and summer.
Independent, 1994
Most of us see Italian landscapes for the first time over somebody else’s shoulders—the valley of the Arno, for example, behind Pollaiuolo’s martyred St Sebastian, or the lakes of Mantua through the back windows in Mantegna’s strange Death of the Virgin. After a time it seems natural to want to move the all-important central figures for a while and to walk into the picture, in particular the part that they necessarily hide from you.
On my bedroom wall, from as early as I can remember, there hung a coloured Arundel print, in what I thought of as a gold frame, of the Mona Lisa. (Parents were less enterprising then about what they put on the walls.) There she sat, and beyond her in the distance heaven knows what mists and shining waters, a bridge that seemed to have very little support, and a road that led from the water margin, with extravagant bends and twists, apparently to nowhere. I have been told since that the magic landscape is a fantasy on Leonardo’s studies for public works, the project, that is, for diverting the course of the Arno and flooding the Valdichiana. Several people have been able to identify the place exactly, but no two of them have ever agreed. In any case, it was my first Italy.
With Canaletto, two and a half centuries later, the cityscape and waterscape have moved to the foreground. He was painting for visitors and cognoscenti who wanted to take away with them first-class pictures of manageable size that would also be a noble memento of Venice. He succeeded to such an extent that even today, the mental image we have of Venice derives from the pictures he painted. We are reminded of this in ‘Canaletto,’ the exhibition of eighty-five paintings and sixteen drawings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Even more than Arles belongs to van Gogh and Provence to Cézanne, Venice belongs to Canaletto.
In the middle of a city stranger than the imagination could devise, Giovanni Antonio Canal—Canaletto—worked with professional calm and industry, and presumably with an increasing number of assistants. It was his business to adapt Venice to his patrons, and his patrons to Venice. His work, perhaps as a natural consequence, can be found all over the world except in Venice itself—until quite recently, only two of his pictures hung in the Accademia. (His eleven views of London and England in the present exhibition came about because his patrons invited him to London, where he painted Venice-like views of the River Thames, among other things. (But the English are more inclined to get their view of London and the Thames from Whistler.)
‘Most people,’ wrote Hugh Honour, ‘derive their first impression of Venice from Canaletto.’ This should mean, and does mean, a superb display of palaces, churches, and campanili, patterned with sun and shadow, between a scarcely clouded sky and the reflecting water.
But for a good many British picture-fanciers their first Canaletto is not like this. It is The Stonemason’s Yard, lent to this exhibition by London’s National Gallery. The setting here is the Campo San Vidal, or Vitale—not a showplace—looking across the Grand Canal towards what was then the Scuola and church of Santa Maria dell Carita. The smoke in the distance might be from the boatyard that is still in the Fondamenti Nani, and where somebody always seems to be burning old paint or tar off the hull of some vessel or other. Apart from that, there is not much left today to recognize in this beautiful picture. Santa Maria della Carita’s campanile fell in the 1740s, the Accademia’s bridge has been built across the canal, and there is no stonemason’s yard. Indeed, it seems doubtful whether there ever was one, although it may have been opened up temporarily for the repair of the Church of San Vidal. The Grand Canal appears only as a gleam of dark blue, with just-discernible ferryboats waiting to cross.
In the left foreground there is a daily (or more likely hourly) moment of drama. A child has fallen over (there are lumps of stone lying about everywhere). The mother drops her broom and holds out her arms in dismay. Another woman leans, rather dangerously, from the drying balcony of her house. This is the women’s world, although one of them has crossed over to do some washing to the men’s world of work on the right. There are boulders of white stone, hewn and unhewn, and the masons can be seen in their rickety wooden shelters, which appear to be made out of driftwood.
The picture, then, is divided into what is made and who does the making, somewhat like Velázquez’s Hilanderas, where the barefoot weavers are in the foreground, with the tapestries and important personages at the back. (There is no way of telling whether either Velázquez or Canaletto had any social comment to make. Tapestries have to be woven and buildings have to be built and repaired, and no one is likely to understand this better than a practising painter.)
J. G. Links, an organizer of the show and the world’s leading authority on Canaletto, comments in the catalogue that the picture is ‘Canaletto at his finest, the Canaletto that might have perpetuated but for the pressures of the English dukes and their representatives in Venice.’ He is thinking in particular of the Duke of Bedford, who commissioned, through his agent, twenty-two views and two festival scenes.
However this may be, Canaletto seems not to have resented the pressure of money, and continued for forty years to paint the majestic Venice that we (although not dukes) expect to see and want to have seen. The effect of these paintings, Ruskin said, was that ‘we fancy we are in our beloved Venice again, with one foot, by mistake, in the clear, invisible film of water lapping over the marble steps in the foreground. Every house has its proper relief against the sky, every brick and stone its proper tone of retiring air.’
Ruskin, of course, wanted much more than this, and denounced Canaletto (although he admitted that his materials were good and his colours lasted) for material-mindedness. ‘Let me count—five-and-fifty, no; six-and-fifty, no; I was right at first—five-and-fifty bricks.’ Here he was mistaken, for Canaletto did not aim at that kind of accuracy. He combined different viewpoints to include everything that he wanted, altered the bend of the Grand Canal, and even moved, if necessary, the column of St Mark. This makes his work more, rather than less, delightful to topographers.
But in the main, the just-likeness, the unfailing control, even the five-and-sixty (no, five-and-fifty) bricks are some of the great pleasures of looking at these pictures, and so they were meant to be. Canaletto is meticulous, too, about which roof is being retiled, which façade is being patched up and which pavement is being laid, and although it is hard to tell what season it is you can judge the time, not by the unreliable clock towers but by the length and angle of the shadows.
Venice is often said to have changed less since the eighteenth century than any other city in Europe. The current exhibition, although it hasn’t been arranged with this in mind, will take you on a majestic journey up the Grand Canal. You will, however, have spent a good deal of time over the early stages since Canaletto, naturally, had to concentrate on the most splendid, popular and often-commissioned vedute, or views.
After an entry from the sea along the Molo, the quay at the foot of the Ducal Palace, with a heartening display of shipping from many nations on the sparkling water, you land at the Riva del Schiavoni and then pause while Canaletto shows view after view of the Piazza San Marco. Trained as a stage painter, he is presenting the Piazza as a vast theatre. It is said to be never quite empty, not even in the cold Venetian winters, not even in the early hours of the morning. Canaletto (whether Tiepolo painted the figures in for him or not) has arranged it with groups of substantial-looking citizens in wigs and tricornes, together with Moors, Turks, and beggar boys approaching likely customers who are obliged, perhaps, to give something in order to avoid losing face in this most public of places. There are women, too, with baskets and in black clothes, who may or may not be selling something, and a number of small curly dogs of a breed that can still be seen in the Piazza.
In this Venice without vaporetti, without aerials, without pigeons except for an occasional flight across the limpid sky, you are not exactly at home, for you are always watching from the outside and usually slightly from above, but if you have a little time to spend you become a deeply concerned spectator. Then you will notice the sweep attending to the trumpet-shaped Venetian chimneys from the outside, a puppet show raised high above the spectators, friars arriving by boat at the landing stage, knife grinders, street vendors protected by unwieldy umbrellas, men urinating in quiet corners or stretched out in the sun. Above all, these people, if they possibly can, are conversing with one another, for that is what they came out into the streets to do. You can feel the human pace of life necessary to the city that, after all, is still like no other on earth or water.
It you leave the Piazza with Canaletto’s patrons and embark, at last, up the Grand Canal you pass on your left the little Dogana—still in business as a customs house—and the great plague church, Santa Maria della Salute, the Virgin of Health and Salvation. The architect was commissioned, in 1631, to give it ‘presence,’ as a mark of thankfulness for the city’s deliverance from the plague, without incurring too much expense. His solution was the vast dome, grey as the passing clouds, and apparently out of proportion with the rest of the Venetian churches; it seems almost to have hypnotized Canaletto, who includes a view of it, near or far, in as many of his pictures as possible.
After the Salute you have to trace your course to the Rialto, the only bridge at that time across the Grand Canal. Here Canaletto pauses again, to take views from different positions on the steps and in different directions—north, northwest, southwest. The next great reach ends where the Cannaregio Canal joins the Grand Canal, leading away towards the mainland.
There is a great deal that Canaletto could not, and in any case would not have wanted to, tell us about Venice. To many addicts it seems an autumnal, twilight city, melancholy with the weight of its past. There is not much trace of this in Canaletto, or (this is Ruskin again) of ‘what there is of mystery or death.’ Perhaps this is only to say that Canaletto, who died in 1768, before the final ruin of the Republic, was not a romantic. He doesn’t—as Francesco Guardi does—show us the restlessness of the light, the uneasiness when a squall blows up, the slip and slop of the water or the strange weathers when the buildings seem to be disappearing or even taking off into the mist.
There is a darker side, too, to what D. H. Lawrence called the ‘abhorrent green slippery city.’ When one of the oddest residents of all, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), found himself at the end of his resources, he rowed a sandalo out to one of the empty islands. ‘I’ll be quite plain about it. If I stay out on the lagoon, the boat will sink, I shall swim perhaps for a few hours, and then I shall be eaten alive by crabs. At low water every mudbank swarms with them.’ The scandalous novel the unhappy Rolfe wrote in Venice was called The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, and the hopeless search is another powerful image of the mazelike city.
Henry James’s American visitor never gets possession of the Aspern papers. He is left drifting among the small canals and backwaters ‘to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and devoid of a purpose and could extract from me no order but “Go anywhere—everywhere—all over the place.”’ In Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, Aschenbach, staying on and on in humiliating pursuit of Tadzio, falls in love with his own corruption. ‘The atmosphere of the city, the faintly rotten scent of swamp and sea—in what deep, tender, almost painful draughts he breathed it in!’
These are seasons of the mind when the gondolas look—as they have done to so many people—like swimming coffins. To Canaletto, it is surely safe to say, they never did. It was his business—in every way his business—to leave us with only the serene aspects of the Serenissima.
New York Times, 1989
If you go to the Holy Land as a pilgrim, you are hoping for (which, of course, is not the same as expecting) an experience not like any other.
Someone gave me a pocket guide ‘prepared by the Polyglott Editorial Office’ that says that the visitor to Jerusalem does not expect sights of the usual kind; ‘he wants above all to visit the Holy Places.’ More blood is said to have been spilled over Jerusalem than over any other city on Earth. You are going there, however, to walk where Christ walked, and you hope for the gift of tranquillity.
Probably you ought to do what you can to guard against disappointment. You have to take yourself to one side and remind yourself that you know, or have been warned, that almost all the churches have been rebuilt, that there is scarcely any proof that anything’s what it’s traditionally said to be, that Jerusalem itself has moved northward over the centuries so that the walls are in a different place. The Inn of the Good Samaritan is a police post, where you can be photographed sitting on a camel. The Holy Sepulchre is a nightmare, divided up between every Eastern church that reunited with Rome from the twelfth to the nineteenth century. Possibly you particularly wanted, as I did, to see Emmaus, where, three days after the crucifixion, Christ sat down with two of the disciples ‘and was known to them in the breaking of the bread.’ But you won’t see Emmaus, because nobody has any idea where it was.
Then there is the question of the lilies of the field. Polunin and Huxley, in their Flowers of the Mediterranean, say there are a thousand different flowering plants within a five-mile radius of Jerusalem. I hesitated to ring up the travel agency to ask them how many would be out at the beginning of April, because I didn’t want to sound like what I was, an elderly English female traveller. In the end, I did ring up. It turned out that everyone else had asked the same thing. And although it had been snowing the day before we arrived, the lilies of the field were out in their myriads.
The bulbs and seeds lie dormant in the unpromising-looking batha—the dry heath between patches of rock. Now it was their season—the corn gladiolus, dark red corn poppy, field marigold, star of Bethlehem, scilla, dwarf iris, anemones in drifts, and the pale pink Cyclamen persicum, a reminder that cyclamen, like budgerigars, should be seen wild, and in flocks.
The native flora mustn’t of course be dug up or picked. The New Zealand couple in our party, a retired chemist and his wife, said that this was a good thing in ways you mightn’t expect. A few years back they had taken home some packets of English wildflower seeds from the Chelsea Flower Show and planted them and they had grown out of all proportion—giant feverfew, overwhelming cowslips. Both husband and wife seemed almost to welcome each day’s difficulties, as something to be got round and put right. Their tolerance was a miracle in itself.
Equally calm, and almost equally skilled with photographic equipment, were two good-looking Australian women near retiring age. They were nuns, belonging to an Australian teaching order which had quite recently given up the habit, so that they had been faced with the situation other women can only dream of: they had been given a reasonable sum of money and told to buy everything new from scratch. Sister Paula’s great-grandfather had been an Irish convict—he had been transported for setting fire to a house—and it amused her to think that this ‘sin’ had turned out to be a great help to her.
The Franciscans have been caring for the holy sites and their excavations since the fifteenth century. Like other custodians, they have closing times during the day, but if Sister Paula was at the gate there seemed to be none.
In charge of all of us was a Methodist minister who knew every stone of the way. It’s impossible to calculate how many religious groups are circulating through Palestine in the weeks before Easter, but all of them have to welcome each other in fellowship, yet avoid crowding each other in practice. As he negotiated this, without apparent effort, it struck me that the minister might have been the right man to bargain for hostages. On April 3rd we went into Jerusalem through the Damascus gate. All new buildings in the old city must now by law be faced with the local limestone, so as soon as the sun falls on it, it is Jerusalem the Golden.
In the morning, the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock.
In the afternoon, the Shepherds’ Fields, the old night pasture a few miles to the east of Bethlehem.
The driver was unwilling to go, because not long before there had been some bus stoning. He was persuaded. There were anemones in the fields, and poppies, mustard, cyclamen, yarrow, chamomile, thistles. At the Franciscan chapel, built to the north of the fields in 1954, the brother in charge spoke only Spanish. Responsibility for the Holy Places is supposed to be shared between the nationalities, but it’s difficult to get enough Franciscans from Britain and the United States, and the Spanish and Italians do much more than their share. You can rest here before going down to Bethlehem and the bewildering Church of the Nativity.
On Wednesday, along the old Roman road via the Wadi Quelt, with the rock-built monastery of St George high up on the other side of the divide, to the mud-coloured ruins of Jericho which lie along the wadi’s banks as it opens into the Jordan valley; then to the high plateau of Masada, where the Jewish rebels, the Sicarii, held out for three years against the Roman armies; then a bathe in the Dead Sea, and back through Bethany to the house of Lazarus, a rock-cut tomb in the cellars. No one pretends to know whose house it is—but it dates, at least, from the first century. Lazarus, perhaps, was buried there twice, since after being raised from the dead he must have died again.
On Thursday, the Mount of Olives. The most beautiful of the gardens is not Gethsemane, but the garden of the Russian Orthodox church of Mary Magdalene, built by Alexander III in memory of his mother. But it is not always open.
On Friday, north to Caesarea, lunch, in a stiff breeze, at Herod’s Palace overlooking the lake of Galilee, a coach (with the driver shouting ‘Hallelujah!’ as he rounded the corners) up Mount Tabor, in the evening the Ganei Hamat Hotel at Tiberias, warm, prosperous, palms, mangoes, orange groves, storks, white-tailed fish-eagles. From the hotel’s drying-roof at night you could watch the lights of the fishing boats moving like sparks on the dark blue water of the lake.
Saturday was left for northern Galilee. We took off our shoes and stood in one of the streams that are the sources of the Jordan, a clear shallow edged with thick rushes. On the way back we crossed the Golan Heights down to the eastern shore of the lake. At the kibbutz at Ein Gev, like everyone else, native or stranger, since the Feeding of the Five Thousand, we were given St Peter’s fish for lunch. Further round the lake, a Byzantine mosaic at the Church of the Loaves and Fishes, which has been moved now to a place near the high altar, shows the basket with five miraculous loaves and two of these fish. They are lake mullet, ornate, deep-finned, fried deep brown, with a reproachful eye and many bones, succulent but strongly flavoured. We took the ferry back, six miles or so across the lake, and bathed in the natural hot springs at Tiberias. (This is expensive, but if you stay for two nights the hotel gives you one free ticket for the baths.)
Meanwhile Sister Paula went to dine with yet another Franciscan friend of her brother’s, this one from Sydney, at a waterfront restaurant; St Peter’s fish again, she told us. On Palm Sunday we were at Cana, where Christ, at the wedding feast, turned water into wine. Sweet wine was already poured out for us to try in the brilliant sunshine. After Cana there was only one place left for us to visit before Tel Aviv airport, and that was Nazareth.
I must have left out a quarter of what we saw and did. After a few days, I began to think I had been wrong to ask for the precious experience of tranquillity, or rather an idea of what tranquillity was like. I changed my mind, or rather my mind was changed for me, on the northwest shore of Galilee. Very early on Palm Sunday we went to the chapel of St Peter’s Primacy, which commemorates the place where Christ gave the charge to Peter, ‘Feed my sheep.’ The air was still cold and the sky, from end to end, was the colour of an opal. The minister stood in the open air, under an evergreen oak, to celebrate Communion. Outside the lakeside chapel the rock projects a little and the clear water of the lake washes over the stones, grinding them down, so much more slowly than the sea, into pebbles.
Some may have travelled down from as far as the snows of Mount Hermon. I took one of these pebbles from the edge of the lake and kept it. It is a pale red conglomerate, perfectly flat and smooth and almost a perfect oval. I think it may have some jasper in it, and it shines a little in a good light.
Independent, 1992
1A review of ‘Canaletto’, an exhibition organized by Katherine Baetjer and J. G. Links, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, 2 November 1989—21 January 1990.