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.