Ulverton (20 page)

If I seem to berate this gentleman before you now, with his curling smile, his smooth skin, his elegant forelock, his gold-ringed fingers and his shiny silk coat (fitting contrast to the previous portrait), then it is not for his inability to surmount these pecunious obstacles to instruction, whether moral, religious, or scholarly, that I do so; for his very appearance ought to have struck admiration out of the rough green shoots in his care, however irregularly they besought themselves to that dingy room which is christened, by some quirk of meagre endowment, the Ulverton National School for Boys and Girls. No, a very Titan of teachers would have lasted no longer than he did (two years), with likewise no more to show for it than a broken ruler, and some inane parroting of portions of the Book of Common Prayer – one
book,
to be precise, shared out like the loaves and fishes until each torn page grows too black and greasy to be read at all. No, it is not for his failures – which are not his, but Society’s – that I adopt the stern manner, but his ‘successes’. Fled from a student past of gambling debts and general dissolution, he sought to conceal himself in our pastoral fold, under a respectable wing, and there set about the business of shaking once more that trollop Scandal out of her brief slumber.

Need I say more? Surely not – merely look upon the face my lens has so ruthlessly caught, and see how the corrupt life has slackened the mouth, and watered the eyes, and swollen that handsome nose, yet retained its power to lure the wives of our parish out of their boredoms. Yet as suddenly as he appeared amidst us, reaping his poisonous oats, has he vanished now, not a week after this image was recorded in my studio, not a month prior to my writing these very words – vanished one night after a bout of drinking, vanished like a shadow from our conscience, leaving his belongings, abandoning his conquests, fleeing (no doubt) from that dingy schoolroom, wherein the failure of his moral life must have been daily emblemised in every dusty nook and damp cranny, in every grinding moment of a useless routine, in every bored cough and hideously automatic repetition of our Lord’s golden syllables.

Far preferable, to my mind, is the human subject when revealed in its natural habitat, than in the studio: how much more possible this is, with the instantaneous brush of the photographer’s art, than with the slow dab of the painter’s! The Reverend Walter Willington, seen here resting from his spiritual responsibilities in the shrubberied glory of the rectory garden, is a remarkable testimony to the healthy nature of a life devoted to quiet worship and devotion to others: he has been rector in the parish of Ulverton for over fifty years – and now, in his eightieth year, the grandchildren of those he once baptised, are in turn wetted at his
hands
over the ancient font. When he first came, so lamentably attended to was the church, that on striking the lectern for emphasis during his first sermon, the resultant cloud of dust quite hid him from view. Now the perfume of beeswax prevails, a fine new organ has been installed, and a bag of mint humbugs in the vestry is quite emptied each Sunday, so pressing are the numbers of children that worship.

I choose this picture among many I have taken from the Church brethren amongst us, for its peculiar air of peace: innumerable are the times I have sat as a guest at this very table, in this very same creepered corner of the rectory garden, blooming with lilac, and wished myself to be in no other place but Heaven, were this pouring of the tea to continue for eternity. Only the clamour of the rooks in the graveyard oaks, and the murmur of bees clustering at the foxgloves, and the chimes of crockery – only these tell us we are hurrying on, for the shadow upon the sun-dial fools us it is stilled; while the breeze from the downs ripples through unceasingly, with its hint of grass, and corn, and the faint bells of flocks, moving like flecks of foam upon a green wave.

If higher mortals scoff at my celebration of this parochial encumbrance to novelty and brilliance, to the pursuit of innovation and enterprise, huffing and puffing on its gleaming tracks, then let me say only that life cannot always be moving post-haste until it take our breath away, and fill our eyes with smuts, but that stillness and pause are the essence of struggle, and the pith of sobriety. Let the calm of this humble scene, in which the old stone dial (and its motto) serves as our admonition, be as water that settles the dust upon a highway, and slakes the soul.

And so we bid adieu to our English village, slumbering on in its quiet valley, far from the city and its peculiar wants. Let these twenty-four scenes remain as a portrait faithful to an institution that has grown, not as a railway grows – in dust and curses, in mathematical gauging and ruthless application – but as a nurtured seed, that buds too slow to notice, and yet breaks the frost. That is not sown on the wind, but in the rich tilth of an unrecorded history, plodding on between an English earth and an English sky.

It was with profound delight and honour that I accepted the invitation last winter, from Mr H. Wallis Dobson, to accompany his team in their excavation of an Egyptian tomb complex, at a site I must refrain from disclosing, lest the riches therein be garlanded by other than the British Museum. The subject of the following ten plates is a site from which no gold has been discovered, but rather the priceless metal of the painted image: scene after scene decorates the walls, as freshly coloured as the day, millenniums past, the hand of the tomb painter applied his brush by the flickering tallow.

It may be of interest to note, how industrious the scene is, with its ladders and spades and earth-spills and boxes, its army of Arabian helpers, stripped to the waist in the blazing sun, its dusty air of application – as if a building was being constructed, or the underground railway of Sir John Fowler were being dug into the sand of Egypt, not the clay of London! This was a surprise to me, who had always imagined excavations to be quiet affairs – of one or two bespectacled scholars, handkerchiefs upon their heads, scraping with a trowel in the studious concentration of a library sojourn. May this plate, then, lighten the ignorance of others, as well as myself, and serve as introduction to the images of the far past these heroic individuals revealed to daylight, after unimaginably lengthy time.

Mr Wallis Dobson may be seen in the middle of the picture, with a paper (it is a map – a magnifying glass, essential for the perusal of plates, reveals this clearly) and the clean-shaven young man to his right is Mr Stephen Quiller, his young assistant – an acknowledged expert in the decoration of ancient tombs.

The peculiarly harsh light of the Middle East presents a challenge
to
the photographer (I need not mention the problems of fine blown sand in the mechanism, or indeed – I may add with feeling – of cholera) that is only overcome by an equally harsh adjustment of one’s prior conclusions, arrived at in the soft, wet light of England. I saw, when perusing this subject, how the glare of the desert, and the deep darkness of the tomb’s interior, stood in threatening contrast – so forceful that the image might have vanished completely into mere patterns of light and shade, as unintelligible as newsprint in a foreign country.

I waited, therefore, for the hour before sunset (when the workers were prone upon their prayer-mats) to make this plate, that might remind us of the Tomb of our Risen Lord – with the stone set aside, and the narrow opening; to enter which one is forced to crouch, and walk almost on all fours, before standing upright in the chamber, whose air is so cool upon one’s moist cheek, that one immediately shivers. I have included Mr Stephen Quiller for a human scale, that the true size of the opening may be ascertained – although it must be said that he is a tall man, and the smallness of the opening may have been thus exaggerated.

If this image also puts one in mind of the stone burial chamber upon the English downs (see Plate XIII,
ibid
.), then in such coincidences of appearance, a long sea-voyage apart, may lie a secret web of knowledge, that once ascertained and drawn out, could provide a key to all mysteries – and make of the past a well wherein our own thirst might be slaked, and our petty confusions buried.

Mr Stephen Quiller was considerate enough to allow me a full day within this small room, in order for the apparatus necessary to the recording of its appearance to be set in place: ten lamps in all were required, and the smoke from their explosion almost choked myself and my Egyptian helpers, and Mr Quiller himself. The results are, as you can see, wholly satisfactory, and this method is far less laborious than that of the pencil and paper, though the
latter
is still more effective when close detail is required, in these difficult conditions: for the effect of the sulphur lamps is to whiten some areas overmuch.

I am intrigued, still, by the small object on the upper left – no doubt, as Mr Quiller surmised, a trick of the light: for it does resemble a bird, such as a rook, or a raven, with spread wings – though no image of that kind (indeed, this first chamber is quite lacking in decoration, save a patterned frieze) is to be discerned upon the walls of this room. This puts me in mind of an instance when, in the developing of a forest subject, I saw (to my evident surprise) what appeared to be an old, white-bearded visage amongst the undergrowth – but on closer inspection, I saw to be the happy conjoining of a grass-stalk, and the leaves of a blackberry bush, and a patch of dappled sunlight.

Imagine my relief – that I had not, after all, captured the Daemon of the forest, or disturbed the Spirit of the woods! Such coincidences of light and dark, inevitable in our art, have given rise to the wildest of speculations, and set bolting out of their lairs the creatures of credulity and superstition, that one might have thought had long gone firmly to ground!

Emptied of its material riches by robbers soon after the mummified corpse of the immured personage was sealed from the outside world, the chamber here shown nevertheless lacks nothing in atmosphere, in beauty, and in historical interest. Indeed, I stayed a whole morning in its dark interior without surfacing, so entranced was I by its murals; which are highly coloured, and exquisitely executed. Scenes that my ignorance could not provide an iconography for, rippled upon the plastered surface of the chamber walls: harvest dances, the casting of seed, a wedding procession, a birth, and a journey in a reed boat upon tiny wavelets that seemed almost to shiver in the damp air funnelling into the tomb (and more savage scenes of war, and those I can only describe as indelicate) – these and many others surrounded us
upon
three levels: a pulsating and ancient tapestry, that for several thousands of years was hid in utter darkness – a blindness wherein nothing moved, no dust collected, and not a sound was heard.

Indeed (I hear myself surmising) was it not until the stone slab stirred again that these paintings had, since the paint was first dry, any kind of existence? Without light of any sort, or eyes to pierce the darkness, did not these works lack being – for thousands of years, even – until Mr Quiller’s strong shoulders, and those of his assistants, slid the slab back inch by inch, and sent a pencil-beam of light probing over hands, and eyes, and beaks, and feet? As if breath was stirring within them, and their parts were being touched into swelling fact? Did not the first lamp, and Mr Quiller’s astonished eyes behind it, act as vivifiers, the torch of grace upon these lost creatures? And was not that non-being meant to last for eternity – these images merely votive in origin, and left for eyes higher, and stranger, than our own?

Look again, carefully, dear reader, upon these ancient scenes: though the conditions of their recording made detail obscure, you may note the tiny glass vase at the woman’s eyes, the wrist-guard upon the warrior’s arm, the cushion upon the throne, the sacks of corn within the cart and the carter’s whip, the horns upon the plodding oxen, and the great sharp-beaked profile of the bird-god upon his delicate ankles. Sudden illness prevented me from completing the record, alas, but reflect on the ease of your viewing, before you ring for sherry, or for tea: a few weeks after my departure, it was noted (I quote from Mr Quiller’s recent letter to me) that ‘the colours you thought so fresh (particularly the red) are somewhat dulled, and several areas show signs of severe deterioration – something lifting the paint-surface in flakes, as if a scrubbing-brush had been applied. In our opinion it is the sudden shock of the air, and the evil properties of our own breath, that is causing the damage to the pigment. Thus the removal of the walls is not possible, and, when our detailed drawings are completed, we will perforce seal the opening, and shut this masterpiece once again from the light. I am sorry … your sudden ill-health prevented you from completing the photographic record, as this would have been of inestimable advantage to us.’ How much more fortunate, then, that my camera’s small round eye was at hand to capture at least some of these ancient scenes, before they began to perish.

I have placed this delightful Example deliberately here, not only for chronological accuracy (it is the most recent photograph, from this present hot July of 1859) but also to act as a modern comment upon those strange scenes you have just perused: for if this plate were to be found millenniums hence (as is quite possible) what would our after-generations make of this matter of hoops and mallets? Is the personage with one knee upon the grass (the late – alas! – Mr Stephen Quiller – see previous plates,
ibid
.) in obeisance to some unseen, ruthless deity? Are the long black skirts of the ladies donned as uniform for some violent battle or is this a graveyard, and they in mourning before those memorials of curved wire embedded in the lawn? Is the man in the centre, with his weapon resting on one shoulder (our village Doctor, to be precise), the leader of this ceremony, or the victim of some dreadful rite? And what does the ball there, in its indent of grass beside his feet? Why is his mouth open: is his expression one of joy, or terror? And what does the pale woman (myself!) seated in the wicker Bath-chair before the hedge? Is she alive at all – or is she some waxen idol, the Daemon of the proceedings?