Dover, Sunday: girls, champers and guns

"When the King's messenger came there, they gave 3d in winter and 2d in summer for horse passage. The burgesses found a steersman and 1 other assistant. If there was more labour it was hired with his own money."

From the Doomsday Survey, 1086

Dover has been around a long time. Many of the stories can be found here. And here. When its name comes up in immigration scare stories on Google Alert – which is often - it is worth considering who exactly was looking out on the civilized Romans who bowled up here two thousand years ago; proto stag-party in Prague fodder, I suspect. If the Romans were lucky. The Romans left excellent remains here, built the first fortress, and there’s a museum in the town now, after a planned car-park threw up great excavations. And with global warming as it is, the Kentish vineyards will soon be as good as they were in 44AD.

Just over 400 years ago, in 1606, a Royal Charter brought the ‘Dover Harbour Board’ into being, comprising of eleven commissioners. The chairman was also Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. Shipyards came in the 18th century.

Wars against France (Napoleon) were organized from here, but today I am interested only in the Second World War; and in particular a solitary image. Buried beneath the White Cliffs, and accessed via tunnels now part of English Heritage’s Dover Castle complex, is the HQ of Britain’s border battle with Nazi Germany, a labyrinth of underground tunnels and cavernous rooms where soldiers, doctors, sailors and nurses, plotted first the withdraw that is “Dunkirk” , the “Battle of Britain” in the skies, and later the D-Day invasions of 1944.

These days there is a marvellous guided tour of the tunnels, with audio actors playing out an emergency surgery for a downed fighter pilot. At the entrance it is possible to look out to France. In the spring and summer of 1940 Winston Churchill often did this; champagne glass in hand. Sometimes he was accompanied by the first of the enigmatic women who fleck this trip, his new young daughter-in-law Pamela, who had recently accepted the proposal of Winston’s son, Randolph, on their second date in London. Randolph had proposed to several women that spring.


Winston's spy...

Churchill in the Jamaica Gleaner news, this week.

Pamela – who we know as Pamela Harriman, and was (amongst many things) Bill Clinton’s Ambassador in Paris - had quickly become a great asset to Churchill as her “proximity” to several very important Americans and journalists in London made her at 20, an English rosy-cheeked version Martha Hari.

She was born Pamela Beryl Digby in Farnborough, Hampshire. But she saw more of the world than most Hampshire debs, then and now: Pamela, her men, and possibly even a philosopher or two, return in Paris.

Thus much of Dover.

Dover and Writers

"We must love one another or die."

The poet W.H. Auden has been a source of comfort for many years. I discovered him at school, wrote my dissertation about him at University, and have returned to his works, poetry and prose, ever since. He angered many in the English establishment when he and then boyfriend Christopher Isherwood moved to New York shortly before the beginning of the Second World War, but there are worse sins. (Some say the muted British response to his centeniary this year harks back to his exile in New York).

In 1937, just before they volunteered in the Spanish Civil War, Auden and Isherwood took lodgings on the front at Dover with Alice Slaughter, where they wrote On the Frontier, the last of their joint plays. As drama the piece is not great, though in its subject, tyrant-industrialists creating wars to keep up the profits, seems very modern. Auden was very interested in frontiers and borders, and few still are more potent than the White Cliffs.

I’m standing on them now in the grounds of Dover Castle looking out to sea. A few hundred meters below me in the Charlton cemetery are the graves of my grandparents, William and Doris, my mother, Kathleen, and my younger brother, Jonathan, who died in 1964. In the old town itself I saw one of my first films, Help, with the Beatles; later in the park just by the Shakespeare Tea-shop I almost negotiated a first kiss with a girl named Mary Jane who aged 14 and wearing hot pants got engaged to a Prefect from a Grammar School in Folkestone.

At Kathleen’s funeral I read a version of Auden’s Dover, written here during his stay with Isherwood seventy years ago, two years before Britain went to war, and three years before the relentless three-month aerial dogfight above this town known as the “Battle of Britain”. (On September 11th 1940 over a hundred fighters, British and German, were downed in a single day). Please read it.

At the reception after the funeral a great uncle, an old childhood hero of mine as he had played rugby league for Castleford, up north, found me in the kitchen and told me he’d enjoyed the poem I had written. It was very accurate about modern Dover now, he said.

Chance, strange allusions, found things, love: these are the true ten Power-point plans to life, whatever INSEAD tells us. I lived in New York through 2001. Within a few days of September 11th a poem was buzzing around the web, being sent by email; posted on blogs; speaking to many. It was one of Auden’s most famous pieces, timeless suddenly – as Dover had been for me - and with a chilling imperative: “We must love one another or die.”

“Oh reason not the need.”

In 1603, another plague year in London, William Shakespeare took his players on a tour. The Chamberlain’s men visited Bath, Rochester and came here, to Dover. Was this the time that he wrote, or at least visualized, King Lear? That he saw the White Cliffs and was inspired to write one of the great scenes in modern drama - when blinded Gloucester jumps to what he believes will be his death? My Arden Shakespeare, edited by R.A Foakes, says the play was written between 1605 and 6. It’s all possible.

I like to imagine that Dover Castle helped to inspire King Lear, with its themes of confused family, inheritance and property rights; of Kings and Alpha Men now shaken into crisis by the thrusting greed of their middle-aged children and their own visions of mortality. I imagine too the playwright walking the cliffs before a performance of some work – they are now known as the Shakespeare Cliffs - and plotting The Tempest and its brave new worlds. I also imagine swathes of Kent, the Garden of England, inspiring Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It. It is not hard to. Dream on, here.

Below, the Alkham Valley in Kent, yesterday:



The first performance of Lear was for King James Ist at Whitehall, London, in December 1606. Perhaps Tom Coryat saw it along with the Prince of Wales, his patron. Let’s hope: the play was not performed again in Tom or Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Twenty years ago this spring a National Theatre production of King Lear ended my relationship with drama - until last autumn. I thought Anthony Hopkins’ Lear and Michael Bryant’s Gloucester the best thing I’d ever seen. David Hare directed. I tried theatre afterwards but the plays seemed lightweight; the ideas weak. Last autumn watching Carolina or Change and The Coram Boy at the National Theatre in London I realized I missed the collective wonder that great theatre brings.

Surely that is one of the web’s most pressing issues: its collective is tangible but not visceral: and its shared pleasures consumed alone. Of course watching kids in front of their screens, in internet cafes, or wi-fi’d up and instant messaging as we once chatted, this may just be my age speaking. The academic Sherry Turkel once wrote that unless one was born after 1985 the web was a learned language, not something adopted at birth. My generation is Betwixt indeed.

And theatre is far cheaper than even mediocre football these days.

Where ignorant armies clash by night

…really neither joy, nor love, nor light
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain


If you are standing on the deck of a cross channel ferry headed for France and looking back to land then I reckon that Shakespeare takes the left cliff, Auden (and Isherwood) take the harbour, and the right cliff belongs (in literary terms, for it will also always be Churchill’s spot as well) to the Victorian poet and critic, Matthew Arnold.



Dover Beach is such a well-known and anthologized poem in the English Canon that it is a cliché inclusion here; yet it is a marvellous work that towards its conclusion moves us to wonder how we continue to get things so wrong. The poem is 140 years old this summer. Perhaps the only time I've not fully appreciated Dover Beach was the poem's stagey appearance at the end of Saturday, Ian McEwan's Waitrose rewrite of Ulysses. If I am seeking anything on this journey it is a vision of humanity as far from the cloisters of McEwan's Fitzroy square as it is possible to go.

He came to spread success, and he has spread it...

Above, from The Dovonian, the Dover College magazine, summer 1963.

Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call’d Robin Goodfellow.

Fairy to Puck: A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act II Sc 1.

Bushy Ruff Cottages, Kearsney, South Kent. Saturday May 12th. D-Day minus two.

For over thirty five years I’ve walked out of the back gate of my father’s home at Bushy Ruff cottages in the village of Kearsney, which is about three miles from the White Cliffs of Dover. You can smell the sea, most days.

I turn left up a slope and walk across the elegant grounds of Kearsney Abbey, passing the lake where at weekends old men and young boys steer model boats away from the many moody swans. I’ll cross the small bridge and then visit the Co-op store in River close to the water mill; buy newspapers and milk, sometimes Argentine Merlots or a pork pie. Never once have I thought that I might be following in the footsteps of a famous literary life.

But – yesterday, my last day in the British Library for some time – I discovered a fact stranger than fiction. Suitably, perhaps, in a biography entitled Stranger than Fiction. The book was written by the feisty Newsnight Political Editor, Michael Crick, and considers the life of Jeffrey Archer, author and “character”.

Crick is the kind of journalist we’d all like to be. It was said that in the 2005 General Election the five most frightening words for politicians were: “Michael Crick is in reception.” His study of Archer is quite brilliant, telling a story of which Charles Dickens or Laurence Sterne would be proud. On the cover of the 2000 paperback there are two brief quotes: “Brilliant” says The Times. “I hate this book,” says Jeffrey Archer.

But back to Kearsney Abbey, the summer of 1962. A keen young PE teacher at Dover College, “very contemporary, very pukka, with a pronounced taste for Kipling, a voice like a razor-blade, and a Henry V haircut that was never out of character,” (wrote The Dovonian), appears in a “Dover Players” amateur production right here, in Kearsney Abbey. Where I’ve walked twenty minutes ago.

As Crick writes: “His [Archer’s] most notable role was as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which the players performed in the grounds of nearby Kearsney Abbey. Every night the audience was startled as Puck, clad completely in green, suddenly leapt on to the stage from behind a tall hedge. In fact this leap wasn’t quite as agile and spectacular as it looked, since he’d actually taken off from a raised platform on the other side. But, in the opinion of the Dover Express, “Never could Dover Audiences have seen a more energetic puckish-Puck than Dover College master Jeffrey Archer who created havoc in the wood as he worked for his fairy king Oberon.”

I can, and will, make many literary allusions during this trip, but I was not expecting Jeffrey Archer to make an appearance. But thinking about it, and chance, Archer is not such a surprise – is rather welcome, actually. His lives and myths, their abrupt peaks and troughs, girdled from Oxford onwards by huge press interest that brought celebrity status for good and bad and Prison Diaries, tell us much about our times. Whatever one feels about Archer it is impossible to ignore the man. Simon Cowell of X-Factor fame was an old boy of Dover College too.

Jeffrey Archer is also geographically entwined with a very different pair of writers who I will consider tomorrow.

For a short time in 1961 Archer – known at Dover College as the “Grip Kid” as he was always telling his students to get one – lived at the digs of Alice Slaughter at Victoria Park, in Dover. She, Crick says, “was used to having lodgers with unusual activities. Before the war, she had owned a house on the seafront near the Eastern Dock, where Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden had briefly been her tenants. “they used to have the strangest people there,” says her daughter Joan Czarnowski, “and E.M Forster used to stay.”

More of them on Sunday.

Archer will, I suspect, be one for the historians as well as the journalists. His life is not as unusual as Tom Coryat’s, but just as enigmatic; and both are men of Somerset, for what it is worth. My fellow Contemporary Nomad, the Crime Writer Kevin Wignall, pointed out recently that Jeffrey was last year’s top British author in America – where hardback sales of False Impression – yes, really – were close to 275,000. Archer is still going strong. And there is that Judas book, as well.

Truly the ex-Dover Grip Kid has “put a girdle round the earth in forty minutes.”

Thus much of Kearsney Abbey.

The Times is Very Kind

Today there is a piece in The Times of London about me and the trip:

"While my life is weighty (in a not-unpleasant way), his is light."

From Kate Muir's The Dark Ages

And Crime writer and friend Olen Steinhauer is supportive too.

Tourist Zone or Workplace?

"You’re working in the abstract, sharing space with these people who you cannot imagine existing in the world outside, and the sexual and the personal life is repressed for most of the day. But believe me, when it comes out, it comes out with a vengeance."

Elaine Glaser, BBC Producer.

Today is the last I will spend for some time in Humanities One, the largest of the Reading Rooms at the British Library in London. It has been my home for over a year now, an office co-mingled with my own history, where I’ve been writing a long novel and researching this trip. I’ve lost count of the number of old friends I’ve met here, writing novels, researching searing biographies, knocking off a column, escaping the kids/husband/wife or editor, or just hanging out in between appointments. Probably the most unlikely meeting was with my friend Ian, over from New York, who I spotted outside Rare Books last summer. “Off to Mauritius in an hour,” he said. “Going to write about Dodos. Fancy lunch?” Another was last seen knee-deep in the “Brazillian Dan Brown.” We’ll meet the American Dan in a few weeks outside the back entrance to the Ritz hotel in Paris.

Some people complain that the British Library is not what it was; Will Hodgkinson wrote two years ago that Humanities One is nicknamed “Tourism” because – more or less - half its youngish inhabitants are dressed for the beach and are as likely to be texting a friend or wilf-ing on the wi-fi, as researching the origins of socialism in nineteenth century Poland. Will’s brother is King of Idlers: I think he should let things be.

True it is harder to get a seat these days, and flesh more prominent. But I like the new kind of library. It is half private members club, one quarter scholarly retreat, one eighth dating agency, and one sixteenth PR location (in the evenings men and women in pinstripes clutch white wine in the foyers and celebrate Innovation & Achievement Awards) and one sixteenth exercise in serendipity. And the books are still great.

Several months ago Bill Gates launched Vista here, his new operating system, with the English band The Feeling playing a promotional concert in the courtyard. Like most things Microsoft, the band was late and the mix wasn’t too good. But Microsoft has given a lot to the BL (including thousands of t-shirts). And, as with Google, the future of "old" books is on their agenda – as well as the digital. I like the mix of high-tech and ancient manuscript. In fact, the entire journey I’m making is about both the digital now, and the parchment-y then. And I know for a fact that the BL is working on this relationship with some old friends. Good luck to everyone concerned.

For without the BL (and Wikipedia, naturally) this trip would be threadbare in every sense. I’ve learnt from The Master about preparation. And so many, many thanks to everyone who has helped me do just that: I’ll be back in Seat 2157 in early October.


Thus much of the British Library.

Boris Johnson, MP, becomes minor Jules Verne via John Lennon, suggests invasion

On the first day of Nicholas Sarkozy's France, a Daily Telegraph visionary has the solution to South East England's property madness.

You may say I'm a dreamer, in the words of the poet Lennon, but I'm not the only one. It was back in the 1980s that EuroRoute proposed a magnificent scheme to the British and French governments, backed by such names as Barclays and Trafalgar House. The EuroRoute involved both a road and a rail link, and it strikes me as tragic that we didn't choose it. Dial it up now, and you will see how the motorist goes out to sea on a big bridge, though no bigger than many already in existence. You then arrive at an island seven miles out, like a gigantic Fisher-Price kiddy kar park, and you descend a short spiral ramp to the sea-bed.

There will be a lot of Jules Verne over the coming weeks, and probably not so much Boris Johnson - who strikes me as a Coryat kind of figure. I pity the traveller 400 years on who tries to follow in Boris's footsteps. Or cycle-tracks.

Meanwhile, another view of invasion - the other way around.

And the National Review discovers an entirely new Kent

The Kent Corridor from London to Dover is known ironically as “France’s Silicon Valley.”

Even Walking is Getting Faster

The picture above is from Budapest - which doesn't appear in the top twenty

'World is walking 10% faster'

Ten fastest walking cities in the World

1) Singapore (Singapore

2) Copenhagen (Denmark)

3) Madrid (Spain)

4) Guangzhou (China)

5) Dublin (Ireland)

6) Curitiba (Brazil)

7) Berlin (Germany)

8) New York (US)

9) Utrecht (Netherlands)

10) Vienna (Austria)

Europe: From the People's Daily (China) online

The opening of the large museums indeed make people feel the essence of the European Culture. Various large events being held in the museums show that people still recognize and respect the European culture and history. A good example is that politicians signed their Berlin Declaration in the German Historic Museum.

How one of the most influential newspapers in the world sees Europe on Mayday, 2007.

Late King Lear Weather Hits Kent

April 28, Saturday. (Bloomberg)

A magnitude 4.3 earthquake struck Kent, a region southeast of London known as "the Garden of England",in the worst tremor in the area since 1580, the British Geological Survey said.



Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!

The quake is the largest in Britain since an earthquake in Dudley in 2002.

And a few days later the humourists get to work.

Coming Shortly

One year short of the 400th anniversary of the “first” tourist’s journey across Europe, Robin Hunt follows in the footsteps of one of Shakespeare’s drinking mates, Thomas Coryat, armed with the latest communication technologies (and an online computer database filled with 400 years of European history, rumour, culture, scandal and stories of exile) to create a twenty-first century mosaic that considers travel, identity, pleasure and place, in words, sounds and pictures.

Coming Shortly 2

MAY 14TH 2007

399 years ago today an under employed Englishman whose London drinking friends included William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne and the teenage Prince of Wales, set out alone on a walking trip across Europe.

On May 14, 1608, Thomas Coryat, a Somerset bachelor of 32 and house wit to eminent royal and artistic circles in London, began his trip in Calais after a nauseous crossing of the English Channel. He travelled, mostly by foot, up to Paris, down through Lyon, across the Alps into Italy, then made for Venice where he was to stay for a month and a half. The return journey took the traveller through Switzerland, Germany and Holland. On October 3rd Coryat returned to London after a three-day boat journey from Flushing on the Dutch coast, bringing with him news of a great new Italian invention: the fork.

Coryat was neither diplomat nor solider; scholar nor merchant; spy nor smuggler. He travelled not for profit or politics or position at court, but merely for pleasure itself; the more the better. He was the first pure English tourist. The record of his trip, Coryat’s Crudities, was published in 1611 and is the first tourist’s account of Europe. It was groundbreaking work of un-scholarly enjoyment, as Volpone’s author Ben Jonson wrote in an introduction (one of over 150 authors who wrote a preface for Tom Coryat!).

On May 14, 2007, I begin the same trip, also by foot (trains and buses may stand in for horses from time to time – we shall see). Unlike Thomas Coryat, who wrote in a notebook with a quill pen and whose preparation for the trip amounted to little more than watching The Merchant of Venice and joking with Shakespeare, I have several additional tools at my disposal. These include an Apple laptop computer, Leica cameras, a Tri-band mobile, an I-Pod, microphone and Sony Mini disk and an account for the creation a daily blog.

Shakespeare News

The idea of the Renaissance Computer will feature here over the next few months. Meanwhile in America and London...And happy birthday... Even if Will was not "A man of travel, that hath seen the world."

In the electronic age with its vast databank of stored knowledge, when the mot juste is just a Wikiquote away and human memory of facts all but redundant, the idea of a commonplace book may seem quaint. Every blog, after all, is a sort of commonplace book, with items culled from elsewhere, reassembled, and subjected to vigorous commentary along the way.

One man who has seen much of the world and Kabul writes nicely about the Commonplace Book - the Wiki of Shakespeare's day, as Neil Rhodes suggests in many of his books, see quote above.

The Scarlett Pimpernell Looks at the World

there is more real romance hidden beneath the formal Anglo-Saxon exterior than is possessed by the efferverscent Gaul or the polished Roman. The reserve, the coolness, the marked difference between casual acquaintance and friendship, the general old-fashioned quiet which the Briton adopts, is the artificial wall which he builds around his inner self…

Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlett Pimpernell Looks at the World, 1933

And we'll moonrake here before we start

In Moonraker, written here by Ian Fleming in 1953, "M" said: “I'm always suspicious of sunburned men in England. Either they’ve got no job of work to do or they put it on with a sun lamp.”

He didn't like men who couldn't whistle, either.

And of course, as we all know: “Sir Hugo Drax cheats at cards.” Fleming's big in 2008, it being 100 years since his birth. And Bond is a classic European, after all.

St Margaret's Bay, winter. RH

St Margaret's Bay best thriller

Where we will begin, three miles from Dover

Wherefore to Dover? Let him answer that.

King Lear, Act III Scene 7


Know'st thou the way to Dover?

Both stile and gate, horse-way and footpath.

Act IV Scene I

Read: King Lear



Russell Gardens Autumn RH

Juliette Greco - Sous Le Ciel De Paris

Inspiration as I plan...

...all that is missing is Miles

So here he is.

Background

I want to capture both the moment of Europe now and catch the echoes of its many histories. Trace the threads of European culture, and investigate some of the ways it has been depicted by writers, photographers, film-makers, broadcasters, printers, painters, sculptors, philosophers, new media mavens, exiles and cosmopolitans. By travellers like me.

I can’t expect to enjoy the same sense of stupefied wonder that Thomas Coryat esq. must have felt setting out from Dover in 1608. But I will revel in what can now be achieved thanks to technology, guide books and the works, writings, and creations of previous travellers. My journey will be about a rediscovery of lost Europes as much as a celebration of a twenty-first century Europe. But I will look also at contemporary Cities, Towns and Countrysides where the nexus of communications, cheap travel, and career nomadism make the entire continent appear, at times, no more complex to navigate than Coryat’s birthplace, the village of Odcombe in Devon.

At the core of the journey will be people. People I meet and travel with; people alive and long dead; fictional heroes and villains; artists who have shaped our vision of what it means to be European. From my grandfather, William Avery OBE, who sailed his boat eight times across the Channel during the Dunkirk evacuations of 1940 to jazz giant, Miles Davis. Nelson’s mistress and the first real paparazzi victim, Emma Hamilton. Tracey Emin, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Visconti, (or Isaac Casaubonus, Europe’s greatest classical scholar and inspiration for George Eliot’s tortured dry scholar, Edward Casaubon). Jarvis Cocker and Edmund White’s Paris, Jan Morris’s Trieste…From Leslie Caron, actress, dancer and inn-keeper to the mystic, Hildegarde of Bingen, or the singer Juliette Greco, the modernist playboy Laurence Vail, first husband to Peggy Guggenheim. Gutenberg the printer and Tim Berners-Lee, the guru of the World Wide Web. Pamela Harriman – the courtesan of the century; and Casanova (ditto, just another century).

Another inspiration, for sure

"And I think Chatwin spent a lot more time in libraries than he did on the road, and that is not a very glamorous thing to remind people of. But he spent years in libraries all over the world reading in many different languages, many different disciplines, and he puts most of the British writers to shame with the amount of energy and curiosity that he had and applied to each book."

Biographer, Nicholas Shakespeare on Chatwin's secret

From an edited version of Books and Writing, recorded at the Perth Writers Festival and first broadcast on 25/02/01 on Radio National.