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Looking at this third class train ticket, as one does on a wet Monday morning, I fell to musing about exactly how old it was. 'Third class' tells me it was bought before 1956; 'Southern Railway' puts it between 1923 and 1947. The departure station name 'Boxhill & Burford Bridge' doesn't help at all. Can any station in England have had more names? Opened in 1867 as West Humble for Box Hill it changed in 1870 to Box Hill & Burford Bridge, in 1896 to just Box Hill, and then back to Box Hill & Burford Bridge in 1904. Then someone decided to change it again in 1958 to Boxhill and Westhumble, presumably to save space on a platform sign. Finally, phew, in 2006 local residents insisted it should be Box Hill & Westhumble.
Still with me? Well, I thought there has to be another clue as to when a passenger went to Ashtead for seven pence ha'penny from a station that appeared to have adopted a name on its tickets it never officially had. So I went and had a coffee, stared at the rain for five minutes and then for the first time turned the ticket over to see it stamped '8th April 1939'. Which was a Saturday.
Sorry about that, you could have watched some paint dry. (Drums fingers on desk.) But last night's BBC1 classic An Inspector Calls was simply superb. Everything an adaptation (in this case from a play by J.B.Priestley) from stage to screen should be. Anyway, no more obscure railway tickets for a bit, I promise.
PS: Even the hotel at the foot of Box Hill can't keep out of the game. It's now the Mercure Box Hill Burford Bridge Hotel.
I was wondering how D.H.Lawrence's classic would fare at the hands of the BBC on Sunday. Part of a season of films that will include Cider With Rosie and, heart in mouth, The Go-Between. And all I could think was: Everyone's a loser. We the audience in particular, because an hour and a half is simply just not long enough for this bucolic tale of pheasant rearing near coal mines. Ken Russell did a very creditable job back in 1993, but then he had nearly three and a half hours. This attempt should really have been called something different, like Coal 'n' Camisoles, based on an idea by D.H.Lawrence. Because the second loser was the author himself. The whole point of his novel is total honesty in sexual matters, but our two lovers lost out because from where I was they didn't even get a decent shag. And didn't say any earthy Nottinghamshire endearments to help it along either, which was the whole point of 12 days in the Old Bailey for Penguin Books in 1960.
I think that when you have limited time to tell a story as good as this you should try and stick to most of the 'facts' of the book you're adapting. As far as I remember, gamekeeper Mellors wasn't in the army under Clifford Chatterley, and having glossed over this after it was established at the outset it didn't rear its head again until the end. And then used just to make a cheap political point when Mellors came with Constance to the mine in order for her to ask for a divorce. (Oddly in a very expensive car driven by the pheasant rearer.)
However, there were at least two good things: Stirling performances from both James Norton as Clifford Chatterley and his eccentric invalid carriage made from an upturned bath. But what will happen in a low budget The Go-Between? Leo Colston just having to run back and forth across the lawn to a greenhouse? Cider With Rosie in a Gloucestershire pub yard with a bottle of Woodpecker? Let's see, I don't want to be hasty.
I do hope that as many of you as possible managed to get to the Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, superbly curated by James Russell. I had the good fortune to be taken there by Only Daughter as a Father's Day Treat, followed by lunch at one of my favourite watering holes, La Brasserie in South Kensington. O Lucky Man!
Anyway, the other day I was sifting through my archive looking at images for a forthcoming project and found the above photograph. Two or three years ago I went and looked at the Westbury White Horse, hoping to find the exact spot where Eric Ravilious had painted it (top). What I should've done of course was to have taken a reference print with me, but I didn't. So on my return home I was immensely gratified to discover that one of my pictures had the location pretty much nailed down, probably where that inquisitive sheep is standing. I waited for a train to be in the same position as in the painting, but when a diesel horn alerted me to one arriving I realised that Ravilious had exaggerated the size of the train for dramatic effect, although in exactly the same spot. There is a companion painting that shows the White Horse as seen from inside a railway carriage, the kind of double exposure that I sometimes get obsessed by. The thought that someone could look up from a newspaper in a train and see someone on the brow of the hill looking down and. '...how their lives would all contain this hour' as Philip Larkin had it in The Whitsun Weddings.
I show this picture because it's the only thing I've got to illustrate the Bloomsbury Group. (Apart from something that I'll leave until last.) This is the garden of Monk's House in Rodmell, East Sussex, home to Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard. It didn't appear in Life in Squares, the recent BBC drama about the Group, as didn't Virginia loading her mac up with stones and wandering into the nearby River Ouse. Lots of actors walked about as if they were going to, most of them being replaced by other actors at some time or other. In the first episode Henrik Hanssen off Holby City popped up in the garden of Charleston (another BG hang-out in Sussex) and it took me ages to realise he was supposed to be Leonard Woolf, but later in life. All this was very disconcerting owing to the use of flash forwards, and totally unnecessary. What possessed the producers to replace James Norton playing the younger Duncan Grant with Rupert Penry-Jones pretending to be the older? RP-H is only 15 years older than James N, but actually contrived to look even younger.
I was looking forward very much to seeing this, owing to an odd (well, not that odd) connection with it all. There were in fact some superb moments over the three episodes, not least for me when Clive Bell kept going on about his mistress Mrs.Raven-Hill. We didn't see her (worse luck), but this was 'The Luxurious Mrs.Raven-Hill', wife to Leonard (when she found time) who was a very well-known Punch cartoonist and a big mate and illustrator of Rudyard Kipling. And on top of all this she is the great-grandmother of the mother of my two youngest children. I'm feel sure she will be mentioning it here soon.
It's taken me the best part of forty years to get in here. Staring from afar and the occasional trespass until yesterday I saw marked in my diary 'Harlaxton Manor Open'. For one day only, which I think they do once a year. This is one of my top ten of English houses, a giant confection (a 'cream cake with icing' a friend said) sitting against a Lincolnshire hillside not far from Grantham off the Melton road. There are many 'perhaps', 'probablys' and 'maybes' in finding out who did what, but essentially this is the vision of landowner Gregory Gregory brought to trumpeting life in Ancaster stone by Anthony Salvin, commissioned in 1831, followed by William Burn in 1838. It can best be described as Jacobethan Baroque I suppose, and every over-blown adjective applied to it is true, 'sensational' being the most apt.
My top picture would have been impossible to photograph yesterday due to parked cars on the lawn, so this is from a transparency of June 2000. Apart from my first sight of this fanfare of an elevation, my interest was further aroused when in 1965 a friend of my uncle moved the Jesuit priests ensconced here to a new home down south, a removal feat that had to be completed in-between the morning and evening prayers of a single day. And then Harlaxton Manor was used by Peter Medak for his equally sensational film The Ruling Class (1972) with Peter O'Toole, mainly for exteriors.The Jesuits leased it to Stanford University of California, it subsequently being sold to the current owners the University of Evansville, Indiana, as their English campus.
So we all stood in and around this truly magnificent pile, trying our best not to drool over the heavenly ceiling of The Gold Room, guarded by countless putti, the greenly hothouse atmosphere of the conservatory or the Cedar staircase with its apparently stone-like roped tassels moving at a delicate finger touch. And then, round the back away from the drooling crowds I discovered what I most wanted to see. A covered-in brick viaduct where once a little train was filled with coal that was delivered into the house, bringing fuel to gravity-fed scuttles in the principle rooms.If this wasn't enough, one of my boys tapped The Ruling Class into his phone to discover that this very day was Peter O'Toole's birthday.
Sorry, but I've had my nose in a book. A new Unmitigated book that should be out in the autumn. A lame excuse for the non-appearance of my blog I know, but anyway. Here's one of the photographs for what will be English Allsorts; in fact the last picture in the book. That's Bobby the Dog posing beautifully with a very nearly fully restored 1952 Jaguar XK120 Fixed-Head Coupe in Old English White. Found in a field in Zimbabwe in 1999. Bobby and her owner live very remotely in the Wye Valley in Herefordshire, and this photo shoot was just at the very start of a typically blokeish weekend that involved homemade cappacinos, glugging beer and red wine (in different glasses), cooking mutton in a fire pit and more Jaguars. More soon on the Allsorts front.
Last week I paid my respects to my friend the artist Rigby Graham . The funeral was in the suitably gothic St.John's church in Clarendon Park Leicester, and as we filed out afterwards I couldn't help noticing this surreal juxtaposition. The figure is one of a series positioned on the pavements outside the junior school opposite to slow down motorists, much like those arm-waving plastic policeman they use so effectively in France. I share it with you not out of any ghoulish intention, but simply because I know that Rigby would've loved it.
