THIS year's first day's gardening. Mostly mulchy raking. Robins
for company, of course. Clouds like serial duvets overhead. A
wintry serenity, and everything still. In the village, "We'll pay
for this." What with? Being a devotee of the "now", I pass on.
I clear the gravel moat that I dug round the old house ages ago
to dry it out once and for all. What a success! It is snug down
under. I am reminded of my friend John Nash's delight in painting
inside gravel pits and similar abandoned workings, and of his
tenderness towards rusty machinery, flywheels, cogs, boilers,
corrugated iron - cast-off things which once sprang into life, and
which shelter below the landscape. His was, on the whole, a
pre-plastic universe.
Endless snowdrops, each one so pure, so perfect. Candlemas bells
was what they used to call them. The Gloire de Dijon roses will
bloom from year to year without ceasing. But a good time for mud,
which is everywhere. It, too, is rich, in its way.
Haphazardly, in one of those drifts of daydreams where one thing
leads to another, I find myself back in Coleridge's cottage at
Nether Stowey. Having just thrown a sheet over my geraniums, I am
sitting in the small room where he rocked his baby son with one
hand, and wrote "Frost at Midnight" with the other. He was writing
as he would never write again.
His youthful friend Wordsworth, up the road, was doing the same.
They were making a book, Lyrical Ballads, which would
change English poetry. Walking about at night instead of in the
daytime, they caused scandal. They could not pay their bills. Who
were they? Call the police! So much of our greatest literature was
fashioned on the hoof. Or in the extreme opposite, prison.
St Paul might not have written his Letters if he had been
allowed to preach. John Bunyan's preaching was all too dangerous;
so they put him in a cell to stop it. So he wrote endlessly,
The Pilgrim's Progress, The Heavenly Footman,
intoxicating walk-books. They were long walks through
Bedfordshire.
Alan and I once followed in Bunyan's steps, and noted where he
had translated his native county into a route to God. For instance,
the far-off Chilterns were the Celestial Mountains; and the mansion
where Bunyan had to mend the pots and pans became the House
Beautiful. We stood in its tragic wreckage, imagining its music,
its talk, the paintings on its walls, its flowers, its boys and
girls. Its life.
I have always found ruins perfect for putting together what no
longer exists. Houghton House, ruined, speaks as it never could if
it was whole.
Bunyan's prison cell was close to the river where, on the bridge
at curfew, a trumpet sounded to put Bedford to sleep. For him, it
would suggest "the trumpets sounding on the other side" of the
Lethe. Does anyone read Bunyan now? Whenever I ask, it is: "Oh, we
did it for A level." Set books are necessary, but those we discover
for ourselves are more important.
Our ancestors read the Bible, the Prayer Book, and Bunyan, and
little else. They lived by allegory and storytelling, by what they
understood to be the literal truth. Their journey was with the
Comforter in The Pilgrim's Progress.
Bunyan was a strong man, who had to shoulder an anvil wherever
he went. His genius was to correlate the walking Jesus with his
walk to work - with everyone's walk to work. Today's Christian, no
doubt, accompanies him on the commuter train. A large part of the
day is in getting to the workplace; so it has to be more than
this.