Swanvale Halt Book Club: The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay (1956)

I read Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure of Ruins many years ago, but it has taken me until now to get around to her final and most celebrated novel. It's a book you couldn't write now, if only because nobody would understand all the stuff about Anglicanism, as the narrator Laurie makes her way across Turkey with her Anglo-Catholic Aunt Dot and priest friend Fr Hugh Chantry-Pigg who aim to establish an Anglican school. Just occasionally Laurie's guileless and lengthy sentences of linked clauses come close to wearing out their welcome, and I wasn't quite sure what to make of her taking home an ape she bought from a Greek sailor and teaches to drive (only round the estate, obviously), but I looked forward to reading it each night and finding out what becomes of the characters. 

The Towers of Trebizond is usually described as comic, understandably so when the famous first line is '"Take my camel, dear", said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass'. She and Fr Pigg wander over the border into the Soviet Union to look at a lake and disappear, only to be 'escorted' to an interrogation when they return to Britain. Laurie takes back her aunt's bad-tempered camel (along with the ape), unsure what she will do with it. Yet, not only does the book contain perhaps the best and most humane account of how religion goes wrong, and right, in a couple of pages that I've ever read, serious moments emerge through the silliness and become ever more prominent as time goes on. We learn in passing that Laurie is in an adulterous relationship which complicates how she relates to the Church she can't help being attracted to; we meet David and Charles (surely a gay couple) who fall out while writing books about Turkey, and, after Charles gets eaten by sharks, David takes to passing his work off as his own. Everyone is engaged in some sort of deception or self-deception, Dot and Fr Pigg's plans as illusory as David's reputation or Laurie's scheme of primate education. Trebizond itself, the famed capital of a tiny, dream-like Byzantine offshoot empire, exists only in the imagination, now being represented by quotidian Turkish Trabzon. 

Finally an incident so terrible, violent and unexpected turns the novel into a tragedy and show that a work can be both frivolous and profound. Any book whose narrator says at the end 'I now live in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love', can only be overwhelmingly sad. Dreams, the dreams of Trebizond and its towers, are what power us poor human beings, and yet sometimes - often - dreams can't be reconciled.

Lion Head Spring, Forest Row

Down a muddy lane in the Wealden village of Forest Row lies the Lion Head Spring. It’s a very fine well indeed: stone walls and benches surround the round spring basin on three sides, while the eponymous lion’s head pours water into the pool. When I saw it this week, there were (relatively) fresh flowers lying in front of the basin, remains of candles around, clootie ribbons tied onto the yew tree that overshadows the well, and even some printed Buddhist prayer flags. You can find online lots of lovely pictures of the well decorated with flowers in jugs and vases, or with petals gently circulating in the water (here, for instance, here, or here). This is clearly a well-visited site. But why, and by who?

There wasn’t much to Forest Row apart from an inn beside the turnpike road and a few cottages until the railway arrived in 1866. The well doesn’t appear even on the largest-scale Ordnance Survey maps; though strangely the recess it’s set in does, at least from 1897 – it isn’t shown in 1873. Between those two dates we have Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887, a good date for monuments of this kind to be erected, and the fabric of the well, as well as the lion’s head, looks right for that sort of time. However we might have expected some kind of inscription or dedication if it was indeed a Jubilee memorial.

You will come across suggestions online that the lion inspired CS Lewis to create Aslan, the Christ-figure of the Narnia stories. Naturally I pooh-poohed this at first, but in fact it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility. Among Lewis’s early Oxford friends were the artist Cecil Harwood, who later became associated with the Steiner educational movement which, after WWII, was established at Kidbrooke Park in Forest Row, yards from the well. Harwood died at the house in the village he shared with his second wife Marguerite in 1975. Lewis was also friends with the philosopher Owen Barfield, who spent his last years in the late 1980s at a residential home in Forest Row, an odd choice if he had no existing connections with the place. Both Harwood and Barfield were Lewis’s executors, and The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe is dedicated to Barfield’s daughter. Lewis was conceiving of the Narnia narrative in 1948, just enough time for him to make a trip to see Harwood at Forest Row and find the lion’s head. However, Lewis always claimed he didn’t know where the idea for Aslan had come from, and as he had no reason to obfuscate, the lion at Forest Row is probably a coincidence.

The Parish Council owns the well, and also a plot of land at the top of the lane: they call it Gilham Spring, rather than referring to the Lion in any way. Many people seem keen to drink the water, even if the Council very much say they shouldn’t, at least not without boiling it, and the Friends of the River Medway advise the same. Some enthusiastic souls saw fit to vandalise the sign near the well telling them not to drink it (a sign which I didn’t see on my visit). This is an issue that regularly pops up on the LiberFaciorum Holy Wells page, among those anxious to avoid drinking what comes out of the tap, to the extent of claiming that a spring filtering through a disused graveyard in a city centre ‘can’t be any worse than tap water’, which of course it very, very much can be.

Not far away from the Lion Head Spring is Plaw Hatch Farm, which has its own filtered spring where visitors are welcome to fill up their bottles. Plaw Hatch is a biodynamic farm operating under the aegis of the St Anthony’s Trust, closely linked to the Steiner set-up at Kidbrooke since the 1970s, and some visitors clearly make a joint pilgrimage both to the Lion Head Spring and to the rather safer supply at the farm. I wonder whether this gently alternative spiritual presence is why the well has achieved its prominence, when its history is so obscure and probably not very long at that.

Into the Unknown

My amazing friend Professor Cotillion regularly photographs orbs in her beautiful 17^th-century cottage, little blobs of blue light that aren’t visible to the natural sight but appear to the camera. She’s a brave and intelligent woman and is perfectly aware of the obvious explanation that they are reflections or refractions (and that sometimes the patterning of them makes it very likely that they are), but she likes to think of them as friendly spirits, guarding the space that she’s been lucky enough to inhabit and enhance with her striking decorative gifts.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was in the café opposite the church, and Peter, a man in his late 60s perhaps, came over to speak to me, apologising for interrupting me. He described how, a few weeks before his wife had a stroke (from which, happily, she’s slowly recovering), he woke in the small hours of the morning to a strange white light from behind the TV and a voice which stated, firmly and definitely, ‘Do not move from where you are’. ‘Whoever you are, you’re not taking me or Elaine’, my interlocutor said – though he told me he had no sense that the presence was in any way malevolent. He didn’t feel afraid, though he did feel annoyed at being woken and disturbed. The voice repeated its instruction and the experience faded. ‘I couldn’t have moved even if I’d wanted to’, Peter went on, ‘I tried’. That puts the ‘vision’ into the familiar category of sleep paralysis, but that wasn’t really the point, I felt. I assured Peter that his experience was unusual but one many people undergo, and that the context in which it could make sense might not become clear for a long while. I wondered about the link with his wife’s illness. Peter thanked me, said he was going to go over to the church ‘to spend a few minutes with the Lord – I’ve often told him I’ll make him tea if he turns up and tells me what he’s about’, and he paid for my coffee too. (‘Can I buy you a pie, Father?’)

Over the years I’ve become much more tolerant of these experiences which one might term paranormal. You can see how they might get such a grip of a vulnerable soul that they might need to be gently prised away from them, have it pointed out that they are not rational and they shouldn’t base their life around them; but at the same time, if I believe that human beings are immensely complex, that we are holistic structures, and that therefore our subconscious mind can communicate with us through our conscious awareness, most of the time I don’t feel that, when I meet rational people who paranormal experiences, that my first response should be to explain those experiences away. Professor Cotillion’s friendly orbs externalise her own capacity for love, while Peter’s early-morning voice might well be telling him something he needs to take account of. They are both worth something, because God is everywhere, and not absent from these events either.

Live and Let Die

Typical, you might well think, one of the most momentous changes, potentially, in the way the State relates to the life of the individual, and all Fr Weepingcross can think to post about is some woman’s rattled-off opinions on Goth. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about the Assisted Dying Bill: I just wasn’t in any way surprised by the outcome.

Christians can’t all be found on one side of this question: it was Pope John Paul II who originated, or at least popularised, the ringing phrase ‘the Culture of Death’ to net together euthanasia (as we used to call ‘assisted dying’), abortion, execution, and war; but not all of us go along with it. What we seem to have, in this particular matter, is a culture of autonomy before all else – assuming as an obvious fact that the sandcastle of individual choice can stand against the tide of social expectation. And I am not sure that Christians themselves know what it is they support, or oppose, in this as in many other respects. For centuries the law has defended us against our own ignorance and incuriosity, bolstered our assumption that we are right, and allowed us to continue without examining the basis for what we think we think. That protection has long, long been rolling back, and this is just another step.

But I find myself drawn, the more I think, more in the direction of mad things I would hesitate to say out loud. That the Enemy wants us dead. That he wants us out of the ring as soon as possible, where we can do no more good. That when we begin believing that one life is worth less than another, we make his work easier. That when we take our own life, or someone else’s, it’s like prising open the door of a plane: the air and the other passengers begin to be sucked out along with us. That there are, essentially, no individual choices.

Except I can’t go all that way. I revolt against making someone else fall in line with what I think in this most radical way. Maybe one day our long, bitter process of discernment will resolve that, as well.

Until then, in my imagination, I look to the potential time thirty years hence when medical professionals and others will start subtly hinting to me that the money spent on keeping me going could be better used elsewhere, on more worthy subjects, on children for heaven’s sake, and steeling myself to say, No. I might sacrifice myself for a child, but not for abstract children the State conjures in front of me to persuade me I am worth less. I demand my right to be a burden. I will not disappear for your convenience, I will not weigh my worth against others, not because I’m anything important, but because all human beings are, and accidentally I am one.

Goth on a (Large) Budget: 'How to be a Goth' by Tish Weinstock (Octopus Books, 2024)

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that emerges into print, and this isn’t so much a review (theblogginggoth did a fuller one a few weeks ago) as a reflection. I will say that it can’t have been a hard book to write, whatever experience a reader of it might have: Ms Weinstock delivers her authorised lists of books, movies and clothing items in a series of short paragraphs which anyone could have come up with internet assistance. The second point is that the book offers a very narrow vision of ‘how to be a Goth’, driven by an unusual personal experience. This is Goth as it appears to an ennobled, wealthy industrialist’s granddaughter who becomes beauty editor of Vogue and marries a Guinness, a background Ms Weinstock never mentions beyond alluding to growing up in a ‘house full of precious antiques’ and her father’s death when she was five. When they aren’t long-dead actresses or fictional characters, her list of role models for young Goth women is heavy with fashion designers and artists; her roll of clothing retailers includes outlets in New York and LA, which is fine for anyone who casually jets across the Atlantic. This is a world most of us come nowhere near.

In such a world, when the rich adhere to the markers of revolt, what does Goth mean? For the author her ‘dark’ enthusiasms clearly became a means of negotiating a sense of alienation, but in circumstances of relative privilege – very different from so many first-generation Goths’ experience of suburban emptiness, as outlined by Cathi Unsworth – what’s in the darkness? Ms Weinstock praises her arty heroines for their ‘rebellion’ and ‘individuality’, but these instincts are pursued primarily through consumer choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone, no matter how edgy you regard yourself. Capitalism doesn’t care how you express your individual identity, provided you hand over cash for it; you can have any colour, including black.

In 1993, when Tish Weinstock was all of two, one of her suggested idols, Christina Ricci, played Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values. In the movie, Wednesday gets packed off to summer camp, that particularly American childhood horror that features so largely in the narratives of alienated US children, and naturally does all she can to obstruct the compulsory wholesomeness inflicted on the youngsters there. Traditionally, that’s what all Goths have felt they’re doing: resisting the mindlessly sunny and optimistic. But 2024 isn’t 1993. This is an age of individualism, in which the ideals Goths say they stand for are precisely those that wider society claims it values too; and one of anxiety, where sunny optimism might come as relief. How To Be A Goth unwittingly contributes to the sort of debate that writing on Goth has grappled with for about a decade, for instance in Catherine Spooner’s speculations about ‘happy Gothic’ and the Spracklens’ rage about Goth going consumerist. Has it become nothing more than a vacuous style choice? This book poses the question in an acute form. The answer is, Not quite, I think.

Conformity and adherence to a common, all-embracing narrative are not what our society values now, but the urge to demand such obedience – not just to an outward standard of appearance, but an inner submission of the soul – is an abiding part of human thinking, one of our instinctive survival mechanisms. It’s easy to reach for such narratives when the times are anxious, and when malign parties are there to exploit the instinct. Goth, on the other hand, always says, No, it’s not that simple; no, I will not do as you tell me; I will not tell your story; I will tell my own.

Maybe Goth’s committed to deathliness isn’t about deathliness, but about what can’t be accommodated in univocal statements of identity and purpose, about what can’t be digested and understood. It points towards the truth that there is always more, always something else, in the same way that the priest’s black garb signposts beyond this world and therefore always unsettles by suggesting there might be another scale of value than our own. The deathliness stands not for itself, but for irreducible complexity, and the critique of any grand narrative other than ruin. Beware, it says. In that sense, we can’t tame it, no matter whether we’re onlookers or adherents – and no matter how much or how little privilege we enjoy. In that way, even a Goth on a trust fund can think of themselves as an eternal outsider. But they should beware, too: there is a subtle enemy who can buy off the Church, and it can buy them off as well.

An Underground Mystery for St Catherine's Day

Behind the patchouli-scented shop of crystals and esoteric books that looks as though it should be in Glastonbury, an unassuming doorway opens off a yard. Yesterday a small group of intrepid souls followed a lady with a torch down a steep staircase behind this door, into a strange bell-shaped chamber decorated with images roughly scored into the chalk the cave is made from. One of the figures is a crowned woman who holds a wheel - blessed Catherine the Great-Martyr, in whose honour the place has been opened. 'This is who we're all here to see', says the guide. For this is Royston Cave, and the time is about 1pm on St Catherine's Day.

The cave is decidedly eerie. There's no mistaking the Christian nature of the crucifixion scenes - three of them - and the saints, not only Catherine, but Christopher and Lawrence waving his gridiron aloft. But the rest of it, a chaos of figures, insignia, and ambiguous marks, lurches out of the dark into the torchlight and back again, keeping its secrets. That figure might be St George, or it might just be a man with a sword. The man and woman who seem to be wearing crowns were identified by William Stukeley, who saw the cave when it was first discovered in 1742, as Richard I and Queen Berengaria on the grounds that the 'queen''s crown seems to be hovering above her head (Berengaria was never crowned); not one of Stukeley's better guesses, it seems to me. There is an excited pony and what seems to be a sheela-na-gig; there are rows of rough figures that look like versions of the Lewis Chessmen made by a less accomplished hand; there are hands bearing hearts. 

Nobody, whatever they might tell you, knows why this place exists or what it means. One volunteer has written an entire erudite book arguing that it was a secret Knights Templar chapel created after the order was suppressed in 1307: but even if the virtually-vertical entrance shaft was outside the town centre when the cave was made, any surviving loyal Templars would have been pushing their luck coming in and out of such a bizarre and inaccessible site, let alone making it in the first place. Such an argument puts aside the simple fact, too, that there's not one single unequivocal bit of Templar imagery in the whole place. The saints presumably date it to the late Middle Ages, but that's the best we can do. 

When one of the visitors began describing how the Templars were founded to look after the secrets of Atlantis I decided it was time to go! I emerged blinking into the sun and reflected that the long journey was far from a waste.

Bishop Down

Ironically, as it was pointed out to us at Deanery Chapter today, this coming Sunday is designated Safeguarding Sunday in the Church of England. Some of my colleagues wanted some kind of diocesan statement to be made about the resignation of the Archbishop of Canterbury that they could share, but although I might allude to it in what I say in any sermons I won't be making any declaration to the parish or even the church as such. Other incumbents found themselves dispirited and concerned for the effect on parish relationships, but my experience is that in so far as people in local communities have any attitude to the Church at all they detach the immediate manifestation of it, the clergy and individuals they know, from anything that might be going on more widely. Haters gonna hate, but everyone else carries on. This generosity is, of course, exactly the phenomenon that benefits abusers - nobody believes the person they know could be wicked - but the rest of us can be thankful for it for now. I will very much let the whole thing lie unless anyone mentions it. 

In general, I wish I could be anything more than wearied and unsurprised by the outcome. It's not that I have no sympathy: were someone to tell me an issue had been referred to the police, I might well assume the police were dealing with it, and move on to the next thing (and there is always a Next Thing onto which to move). It wouldn't make it right, though. If I say that Justin Welby's decision to resign could well turn out to be his best day's work during his tenure at Lambeth Palace, I do so not to be mean or sarcastic, but because I genuinely think the Church will ultimately benefit. It's exactly the dramatic, galvanizing event required to blow the whole thing open, to tip the balance away from power, display, and inertia, and it would not be beyond possibility that Archbishop Justin's will not be the only pointy hat rolling in the dust before too long.