2020: Beginnings and endings for a new decade

"Every new Beginning comes from some other beginning's End"  

from Seneca the Younger,  Roman stoic philosopher;  ceramic portrait, Plaza de Espana Seville

This New Year and a new decade is a time for change, and I have decided to focus on the present, on time with friends and family, and the world on my doorstep, instead of the fascinating people and places from the past which have featured in my frozenink blog. The very first post was in July 2012 with a quote from John Evelyn's Diary ( a regular source), and in January 2013 appears the eighteenth century reference to frozen ink, from which my blog was named, but for the foreseeable future this blog will be truly "frozen".  

My very sincere thanks to all my regular followers and to the many people and institutions whose internet material I have enjoyed and used in my research, particularly those sources which are not always properly acknowledged.   My very best wishes to every one of you for a happy and successful New Year 2020. 

"Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new."  Lycidas, John Milton

Stoke-by-Nayland, Summer   John Nash c. 1949  
© the artist's estate/Bristol Museum &Art Gallery

May beginnings: "I'm to be Queen of the May,…*

"Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions. The streets of the cities were lined with buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bomb-sites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the cavity.  Some bomb-ripped buildings looked like the ruins of ancient castles until, at a closer view, the wallpapers of various quite normal rooms would be visible, room above room, exposed, as on a stage, with one wall missing; sometimes a lavatory chain would dangle over nothing from a fourth- or fifth-floor ceiling; most of all the staircases survived, like a new art-form, leading up and up to an unspecified destination that made unusual demands on the mind's eye.  All the nice people were poor; at least, that was a general axiom, the best of the rich being poor in spirit.

The Albert Memorial, Kensington Gardens (photo R. Harding)

"There was absolutely no point in feeling depressed about the scene, it would have been like feeling depressed about the Grand Canyon or some event of the earth outside everybody's scope.  People continued to exchange assurances of depressed feelings about the weather or the news, or the Albert Memorial which had not been hit, not even shaken, by any bomb from first to last.
The May of Teck Club stood obliquely opposite the site of the Memorial, in a row of tall houses which had endured, but barely; …. the Club had been three times window-shattered since 1940, but never directly hit.   There the windows of the upper bedrooms overlooked the dip and rise of treetops in Kensington Gardens across the street, with the Albert Memorial to be seen by means of a slight craning and twist of the neck.

Queen Alexandra House, Kensington, built in 1884 (photo Historic England) 

"….All the nice people were poor and few were nicer, as nice people come, than these girls at Kensington…  The first of the Rules of Constitution, drawn up at some remote and innocent Edwardian date, still applied more or less to them:

 The May of Teck Club exists for the Pecuniary Convenience and Social Protection of Ladies of Slender Means below the age of Thirty Years, who are obliged to reside apart from their Families in order to follow an Occupation in London.

 As they realised themselves in varying degrees, few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely, and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means."

The Girls of Slender Means   Muriel Spark, 1963

Muriel Spark drew on her time at a similar ladies' hostel in 1944 (the Helena Club on the north side of the park) for the May of Teck Club*.  The story unfolds in flashbacks to 1945, from VE Day in May to  VJ Day in August.  Amid wartime rationing and victory celebrations, the girls pursue their individual dreams of careers and marriage:   among them Joanna, the elocution teacher reciting The Wreck of the Deutschland,  Jane, the embryo gossip columnist, Dorothy with her debutante chatter, mad Pauline, and the ever elegant and heartless Selina.
They barter ration coupons, exchange suitors and borrow clothes; a much-prized pre-war Schiaparelli evening dress is a key element in the novel's shattering climax.  Fascinated by their lives is Jane's friend, the anarchist poet Nicholas Farringdon;  "I think he was in love with us all, poor fellow".

Elsa Schiaparelli evening dress, 1938

"They call me cruel hearted, but I care not what they say,

For I'm to be Queen of the May, mother, I'm to be Queen of the May."   Alfred, Lord Tennyson

*The Helena Club was set up by Princess Helena, daughter of Queen Victoria, Queen Alexandra House was established as a ladies' hostel by the wife of Edward VII, and Princess May of Teck involved in many charities, became Queen Mary, consort of George V.

April beginnings: "so priketh hem Nature in hir coragis"*

"Sweet Thames run Softly",  Robert Gibbings wood engraving, 1940

"The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms.  Spring was moving in the air above  and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing.  It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said "Bother!" and "O Blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.  Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air.  So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again  and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow."

The Wind in the Willows,  Kenneth Grahame 1908

"The Wind in the Willows"     Paul Bransom

The first illustrations, by Paul Bransom, were not until the eighth edition in 1913, and many notable illustrators have followed, like Arthur Rackham and E. H. Shepard, but I have always read Kenneth Grahame's story of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Mr Toad in a sibling's 1941 school edition with no pictures, just the excitement of Grahame's words.

As a child, when his mother died, Kenneth Grahame and his sister and brothers were sent to England  to live with their grandmother at The Mount, Cookham Dean, close to the Thames.  Here his uncle, the local curate, introduced him to boats and the river and later when Grahame lived further west at Blewbury with his family, the stories he wrote in The Wind in the Willows were those he had told to his young son Alastair.

  The gardens at The Mount,  Cookham Dean,  Stanley Spencer  1938 © artist's estate

Cookham Reach and Barley Hill,  Stanley Spencer c. 1920

Stanley Spencer grew up in Cookham itself and his paintings of the village and Cookham Lock have made the place famous.  Robert Gibbings was a friend from the Slade Art School, and in 1939 rowed along the Thames in his boat the "Willow" compiling his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.

*"Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages."  The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

March beginnings: "Midway on our path through life, I found myself in a dark wood, Where the way ahead was obscured"*

The Cathedral and Gundulf's Tower,  from "The Gentleman's Magazine"

"An ancient English Cathedral town?  How can the ancient English Cathedral town be here! The well-known massive grey square tower of its old Cathedral?  How can that be here!  There is no spike of rusty iron in the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect.  What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up?  Maybe it is set up by the Sultan's orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish robbers, one by one.  It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by to his palace in long procession. Ten thousand scimitars flash in the sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers.  Then, follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and infinite in number and attendants.  Still, the Cathedral tower rises in the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on the grim spike.  Stay! Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on top of the post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?  Some vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of this possibility.
Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around. "
Charles Dickens, 1870

Illustration by Charles Keeping, Folio Society edition 1982

 So begins The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with the Cathedral choir-master, John Jasper, awakening in a Limehouse opium den.  This was Dickens' last, unfinished novel, being written for publishing in monthly parts.  He died suddenly on June 9th, 1870, leaving the conclusion of this last work itself an unsolved mystery.

The May monthly part, with scenes from the novel, 1870.

A young Luke Fildes made his name when he was chosen to illustrate The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

*The opening lines of Dante's Inferno (various translations):

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita, Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, Che la diretta via era smarrita."    

February beginnings: "You are my sunshine, when skies are grey"*

Cottesloe Beach, and Indiana Tea rooms, Perth,  Western Australia

"On this blazing February day a hot pungent wind brought aromatic scents to our nostrils after seven weeks at sea.  I struggled over the blistering sands, shod in highly unsuitable English boys' sandals, and felt a calamitous sense of loss.    Where were the white chalk cliffs?  Where were the coarse shingle, the diagonal concrete groynes with their threaded green slime and seaweed, the slippery chalk rocks over which one lurched with a shrimping net?  This had been the prospect from Rottingdean, framed by distant views of the Palace Pier three miles away in Brighton, and broken by an impressive row of cyclopean stone piles from the abandoned Maritime Railway.  This was the only 'seaside' I knew and it had always been backed, befriended, or overhung -- depending on the skittish changeability of damp grey English skies -- by towering chalk cliffs at least eight hundred feet high.
But Cottesloe Beach!
The sun melted the tar on the road and it stuck to the unsuitable sandals.  The sea was a series of deep translucent unbelievable blues.  It was Nile green and sapphire blue…"

The Road to Gundagai  Graham McInnes, 1965

Graham McInnes was eight when he and and his younger brother the novelist Colin MacInnes were uprooted to Australia,  after their mother had remarried, and as Mrs Angela Thirkell moved with her children and their stepfather to Malvern, Melbourne.  Perth was their first point of call  (I too crossed the Indian Ocean decades ago, and still remember how incredibly green and beautiful Perth seemed after weeks at sea) before sailing on to Melbourne. His memoir gives a vivid picture of growing up  there in the 1920s.

  Melbourne :  Flinders Street station and Swanston Road, 1927 

* "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine," Louisiana song lyrics, attributed to Jimmie Davies and Charles Mitchell, c. 1939

January beginnings: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,…" (Charles Dickens)

January:  This  month is named after Janus, the two-headed  Roman god who looks both ways, to the past and to the future.  So too do novelists, and I will mark each new month of 2019 not with famous first lines, but with  opening paragraphs, chosen almost randomly, from a wide range of authors.
Wishing you all a Happy New Year.

Spring Woodland,  Ivon Hitchen  © the artist's estate    Manchester City Art Gallery

"About a mile to the north of the village of Rapstone there was an area of mixed woodland and uncultivated chalk downs.  The woods included some beech, birch, field maple and yew.  The grassland, owing to the centuries of peace it had enjoyed from the depredations of farmers and builders, was rich in plant and insect life.  The violet hellebore and the bird's-nest orchid did well there and gentians and wild thyme proliferated. The Duke of Burgundy's fritillary and the Chalkhill blue butterflies were to be seen, as were the trapdoor spider, fallow and muntjac deer, badgers, foxes, adders and slow-worms.  At the foot of the hill there was a stream said to be haunted by two kingfishers, although their nesting place had never been found.

One afternoon in April a Volvo stopped on the road by the stream." 

So begins the battle for Rapstone Woods, between the Society for  Countryside,  Rural and Arboreal  Protection (SCRAP) and  the department for Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (HEAP), and the Minister, Leslie Titmuss MP. is caught in the crossfire.

Quotation from John Mortimer's 1998 comic novel, Titmuss Regained, part of his Paradise trilogy.