The View From the Train (15 page)

Before we set out, Cedric had given us photocopied pages (sent by his brother) from J. M. Richards's compression of Nathaniel Lloyd's
History of the English House
, in which is written, beneath a photograph of the keep of Rochester Castle:

This traditional English scenario contrasts with that of the surprisingly unfortified Roman villa, suggesting that, despite Conrad's worries, the class relations of the Roman occupation were, in the end, more peaceable than those of later periods.

From the car park we had thought nearest, we walked along the High Street in the direction of Eastgate House, the route of Chaucer's pilgrims, passing an unrivalled succession of historic buildings, not much altered since the eighteenth century. The Watts Charity Hospital dates from 1579, but is re-fronted. There is a plaque, which we read, which states that the house is the foundation of Richard Watts (d.1599), and that he left funds for the relief of ‘six poor travellers, not being rogues or proctors' (proctor: ‘person managing causes in court that administers civil or canon law').

Further along, there is a shop that sells souvenir and otherwise collectable china, in the window of which were displayed (as there were when I had last stood there in 1990, and probably will be for many years to come) a selection of plates bearing images of historic military aircraft, and four which together made up a seascape depicting a flotilla of small boats leaving Dover for
Dunkirk in 1940, in which Cedric immediately recognised a Vosper-Thorneycroft air-sea rescue launch. Also in this window were various items of crockery of the green colour that we had been unable to name. I said that I once owned a teapot of this colour, one of the Woods Ware range ‘Beryl' – at which Cedric revealed that his mother's maiden name was Woods, of this pottery manufacturing family. He recalled the Crown Hotel, in Stone, where Stalin's successor Malenkov spent his first night outside the Soviet Union. The hotel is in the High Street, where the painter Peter de Wint was born above the butcher's. Cedric's father, an architect, designed the Blackpool Odeon, and another in Hanley, when working for the practice of Harry Weedon. His brother David Price, who had supplied us with a quantity of information about Rochester, is also an architect. Like Sherlock Holmes, Cedric has a
brother
.

Vivienne Lower, senior custodian of the Dickens Centre, showed us the Chalet. She ascended the external stair, followed by Cedric, and unlocked the door to the upper room, which was a little difficult to open, the weather having been very wet. The building's exterior is, or at least appears, very recently painted, practically as new, but the interior is beautifully aged in surface and odour, and surprisingly dry. The smell was that of sun-warmed, tongue-and-groove pine interiors not often opened to the outside air – summer houses, boat sheds and so on. The furniture more or less matches, but is not original. I photographed the stand-in for Dickens's waste-paper basket, and made some attempts at portraiture.

The room is about four metres square and, I guessed, perhaps three high. We discussed the mirrors. Cedric asserted the superiority, at least in this context, of virtual space over actual space, but I was trying to frame a picture without appearing in it in a mirror, and missed the rest of this. He had recently addressed a conference
on virtual reality, in Berlin. We agreed that Dickens would have enjoyed the juxtaposition of actual views through the windows and virtual views in the mirrors, perhaps more than being merely surrounded by windows.

There is an essay by Eisenstein setting out the similarities between Dickens's narratives and the forms of early Soviet cinema. Eisenstein, it seems, regarded Dickens as the pioneer of montage.
⁸
I had never followed up this aspect of Dickens, who was, with a number of other English-language writers (such as Oscar Wilde and Laurence Sterne) sometimes misunderstood in England,
big in
(revolutionary)
Russia
. While I knew of Sterne's influence on the Russian Formalists, I had never previously read
The Pickwick Papers
but, having discovered Cedric's enthusiasm for it, by the day of our journey had reached Chapter 8. Like Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
, it is much influenced by Cervantes's
Don Quixote
, and in Chapter 50 of
Pickwick
, Dickens has Sam Weller allude to Sterne's
Sentimental Journey
.

I had not realised how close
Pickwick
is to the eighteenth century, both in its date and in the innovative structures of its narrative. It was Dickens's first novel, set in 1827 and written and published, as a commissioned serial, in 1836–37, when he was only twenty-four. It was, on the other hand, the product of a nineteenth-century technological revolution, that of mass-produced, cheap paper, and was a runaway commercial success – so much so that, within the period of its serialisation, Pickwick soaps and Weller corduroys were on sale, and portraits of ‘Boz' appeared on London omnibuses.

Cedric, on the other hand, had not read much Sterne, and we were retracing
Pickwick
's exploration of a period which, while pre-Victorian, is long past the beginning of the nineteenth century. The slightly later period, when Dickens was writing, is that of Marc Brunel's Thames Tunnel (his son Isambard narrowly survived an accident working on this in 1827); the first railways (Euston Station opened in 1836); mains gas for cooking and lighting (the Bankside Gas Works was built in 1815); the first suburban cemeteries (Kensal Green opened in 1833); and the first
mass-media. Amid this modernity, London's population, just under a million in 1800, had reached 1.8 million in 1840, and the city was still much smaller than what might be conventionally termed ‘Victorian' London.

Nick compared the chalet's lightness to the traditional gloom of the Victorian domestic interior. Cedric pointed out that sunlight was, at the time, a recognised cure for killer illnesses (Dickens was already in poor health when he received the chalet); the Victorians' love of views, and the romance of strange sights and strange places. Dickens visited Switzerland in 1844 and 1846, and by 1865, Davos, with its landscape of chalets, was established as a cure for tuberculosis and other respiratory diseases (in 1881 Robert Louis Stevenson would visit, and in 1893 Louisa Conan Doyle). Cedric compared the chalet with Queen Victoria's summer house at Frogmore. Even in the twentieth century, he added, TB was still a killer in Britain: two of his uncles died of the disease. (His Uncle Charles, who designed furniture for Heal's, sending money home to his family, died in the YMCA, in Great Russell Street.)

After Dickens's death, the chalet was dismantled by Mr J. Couchman, a Strood master builder, who had originally erected it, and re-erected at the Crystal Palace, Sydenham, before being moved, again by Mr Couchman, to the grounds of Cobham Hall, as a gift to Lord Darnley from the Dickens family. By 1961 it was deteriorating, and was rescued by the Dickens Fellowship, who presented it to the (Rochester) City Council.

We left Eastgate House and walked back along the High Street towards the bridge, which replaces that on which Mr Pickwick stood looking at the view when invited to consider whether ‘drowning would be happiness and peace'. I asked Cedric how the virtual reality conference in Berlin had gone (it had gone very well). We passed the Corn Exchange, where the clock was donated, in 1706, by Sir Cloudesley Shovel, who I knew only from the sign of a public house in Liverpool Road, Islington, near Cloudesley Square, but who was, it states beneath the clock, MP for Rochester in three parliaments in the reign of William III, and in another in that of
Queen Anne. Nick suggested, rather suddenly, that the clock was a phallic symbol. Cedric recalled an account of Shovel's death at the hands of a woman who murdered him for his ring, but said he didn't know Liverpool Road, and that there were many parts of London which he had never been to. We approached the Royal Victoria and Bull Hotel, which is the original of the Bull Inn in
The Pickwick Papers
.

Beneath the archway, to the right, there was an Italian restaurant, which we passed up. We tried the hotel entrance to the left and, finding it unattended, continued to the bar, which was empty of customers but staffed by two sympathetic young women. A bottle of wine not being available, we bought, in unconscious homage to
Pickwick
, one hot brandy-and-water and two half-pints of Guinness (porter), sat down at a table by the window, and ordered what were arguably
sandwiches
.
⁹
While the others were looking at the menu, I read the notices displayed in the street door lobby:

If you commit any offence you will be immediately barred from all licenced premises in the area.
Proof of age may be required.

Pickwick notes, of Rochester:

Cedric was trying to remember the name of a coaching inn in London, which he thought appeared in
Pickwick
, in which the cellars, later in the nineteenth century, could accommodate 2,000 horses. I had recently learnt (from a radio discussion about biodiesel) that before the petrol engine, about 26 per cent of agricultural land was devoted to growing food for horses. Was the inn called the Star? It was destroyed early on in the Blitz. His mother had owned a car called a Star before the war, built in Solihull. They lived at Studland, in Dorset, in Agglestone Road. His father was in the marines, having been in the Navy in the First World War, and was at Scapa Flow.

We talked about Shovel, about Rochester's wealth (in Dickens, it is still a bit brash) and about the Georgian Navy, ‘the largest industrial unit of its day in the western world'; of the decline of timber building in Britain, and the shortage of timber caused by the growth in iron-making. The
Agamemnon
, Nelson's flagship at the Battle of the Nile, had been the last warship built in the New Forest shipyard at Buckler's Hard. Cedric referred to a (technological) time lag that sometimes exists between England and mainland Europe, as with, for example, the import of bricks and tiles from Holland. He recalled the Soupçon restaurant in Hastings, built with ship's timbers recovered, he conjectured, from a ship wrecked on the nearby Goodwin Sands.

Still in Dorset, I mentioned Patrick Wright's books on Tyneham and the tank, which I had recently read, and that J. F. C. Fuller, the evangelist of tank warfare, had previously been involved with Aleister Crowley. When at Cambridge, Cedric had borrowed a couple of pages of Crowley's diary from Tom Driberg, and
published it in an article by Nicholas Tomalin in
Granta
, under the title ‘Favourite Eccentrics', which led us, via Rabelais's ‘Do what you will', to West Green House – built by Henry ‘Hangman' Hawley (who commanded the cavalry at Culloden) – the former home of Cedric's friend Alistair, Lord McAlpine.

An article in the
Sunday Times
, not long before the 1997 election, described parties at West Green:

Cedric recalled a Christmas at the house; McAlpine was in Venice, and had lent him the keys. His (Cedric's) sister came from Shetland dressed as a witch, his brother David as Long John Silver, and David's wife as a penguin. The witch was later seen begging in the woods. He recalled their childhood home in Staffordshire. Staffordshire, he said, does everything by halves,
¹¹
adding, in the context of country houses, via Shugborough and Ingestre Hall in Staffordshire, that Wren built only one country house, Winslow Hall, in Buckinghamshire, not far from Stowe. Wren, he argued, as a scientist, was a more significant figure than Hawksmoor, who was the better architect.

On a visit to Sheffield, Jeremy Till, the head of Sheffield University's school of architecture, had recommended a visit to Castle Market, a building admired by Cedric who, he said, had gone there to buy Bath chaps, but neither Jeremy nor I knew what a Bath chap was. Castle Market was completed in the early 1960s, designed by the City Architect's department under Lewis Womersley. It is a unique,
multi-levelled interior, its viability now threatened by the mall at Meadowhall. A Bath chap is a kind of fast food: a pig's cheek, cooked. They can be bought in Bath, and in Castle Market, Sheffield (and perhaps elsewhere), but in Sheffield, they come with the jawbone, including the teeth.