Swan and Swann

The Herb Garden at Sissinghurst

Swans are not something I have spent much time thinking about, but they keep popping up on this trip. I am reading Swann's Way; the first story of Marcel Proust's immense novel, In Search of Lost Time. I am reading the Moncrieff/Kilmartin edition, a few pages at a time, savouring Proust's incomparable prose. Here is his description of the evocative nature of taste and smell:

"But when from a long distance past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection".

Isn't it perfect? And true? When I go on a long holiday, I buy a different perfume and every time I smell the scent of that perfume the memories of the holiday rush back. Miss Dior will always remind me of Chamonix, Midnight Poison of Greece and Turkey (and one of the worst hangovers I have ever had after a night on Turkish raki. Never again.), Allure, of a night of wicked abandon in a bolthole. This holiday I am wearing Guerlain Le Petite Robe Noire. Other scents that will remind me of Sissinghurst are freshly mown grass and thyme. There are two thyme carpets outside the Herb Garden, which is redolent with different varieties.

You can see corners of the thyme carpets at the bottom of the photo

I meant to write about swans, somehow I have rambled off and ended up in a herb garden. Anyway, we saw Swan Lake at The Royal Opera House in Covent Garden last week. Having previously listened to Tchaikovsky with much eye-rolling, I was moved to tears by the beauty of the music and dancing in the ballet. It was also much fun sitting in the Balconies Restaurant beforehand, people-watching. There were a number of women wearing dresses that threatened to malfunction while they staggered around on tremendously high heels. It was cruel and yet strangely pleasing to watch with breathless anticipation as they lurched and wobbled their way through the crowd. 

Swans greeted our arrival at Lake Geneva in Collonge-Belle Rive, in Lucerne and at Hever Castle and I have already referred to the Leda and the Swan sculpture in the gardens at Hever. 

Swans are revered in Europe, I suppose because of their beauty, and only the monarch may eat swan meat as she owns most of the swans. I know this thanks to the late Peter Cook, who was very fond of swans, bees and tadpoles. Who can forget the Pete and Dud sketch that included this exchange:

`Have you ever wanted to eat a swan?' `Now that you mention it. . . No.'

`My heart goes out to those people who crave the flesh of the swan. You see, that is not one of our inalienable rights. Only the Queen and her direct relatives are allowed to cram huge wodges of roast swan down their gobs ....'

This is our last day in Sissinghurst and I am very, very sad to be leaving but very, very grateful we were able to stay here. 

The White Garden from the Tower. Priest House is on the far left.

 

The White Garden

A country walk 

Nigel and Ben Nicolson built this in honour of their father, Harold. Nigel wrote there in summer. 

Thank you Vita and Harold

I re-read Yeats Leda and the Swan this afternoon and was surprised how raw it is. I felt as though I was standing close to the beating wings and staggering girl. The picture it conjures is much more primeval than this representation I saw yesterday at Hever Castle in Kent:

Leda looks slightly bored rather than terrified or repulsed, don't you think? I am starting to wonder about myself. I have only been blogging for a couple of weeks and this is the second picture of bestiality I have posted. Well, technically it isn't because Pan was a god and so was the swan (Zeus), although why Zeus didn't just front up as himself I don't know. According the Wikipedia, Leda later gave birth to Helen and Polydeuces. She also had two children to her human husband. The entry goes on to state, "In the W.B. Yeats version, it is subtly suggested that Clytemnestra...has somehow been traumatised by what the swan has done to her mother". Funny about that. I wonder what the ancient Greek is for "EEEIIIIOUUUWWW!!!!"?  Probably "EEEIIIIOUUUWWW!!!!"

Hever Castle has a beautiful Italian garden containing  (I just realised I have no idea of the names of most architectural elements in gardens) a sandstone loggia and terraces and little garden rooms planted in different ways.

Hever Castle, Kent 

You can't see the grapes very well in the photo, you need to zoom in if you are interested.

The castle itself was the Boleyns' home, until they fell from favour and were executed or died naturally, when Henry VIII gave the house to Anne of Cleves (she of the evil smells) as part of her divorce settlement. Anne of Cleves lived there for 17 years. The Waldorf-Astors later bought the house. 

We are now staying in Priest House, Sissinghurst Castle. Most of the Tudor Castle was destroyed during the Castle's time as a prison for French prisoners of war in one of the interminable wars the English had with the French. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson bought the castle in the 1930s and created the most beautiful garden. Vita was a prolific author, lover of Virginia Woolf and subject of the wonderful Portrait of a Marriage, by Nigel Nicolson. Harold was a diplomat, author and garden designer. Theirs was an enviable partnership.  

Priest House, looking on to the white garden  and a bit of husband

I am sitting in the very room where Vita passed away. A chicken is roasting in the oven, friends are downstairs chatting happily in the golden light of a mid-summer evening and I am so, so thankful to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson for creating this idyll. 

English Traffic

Pultney Bridge, Bath, designed by Robert Adam

The GPS in our car speaks with an American accent, which is new for me because in the past I have always been told where to go by Miss Moneypenny. The GPS, aka "bitchface," "you f*&^*" or "*&^*" told us the estimated travel time from Bath to Sissinghurst was two hours. Laugh. We left Bath at 10:00am and arrived at Sissinghurst at 4:30pm. Allowing for the odd misdirection by Miss GPS (e.g. "At the next traffic circle, take the fourth exit", thus directing us to do a U-turn, or, directing us to travel 2 miles in one direction and then do a U-turn and come back the other way. True.) the remainder of the delay was due to all 60 million people that inhabit this island travelling from Bath to Kent today, apparently. I started longing for the Hay Plain, just so I could get away from all the other jolly long-weekenders (it's a Bank holiday on Monday).

The Hay Plain.

What I can't understand is how large swathes of England remain so picturesque when it is so small and there are SO MANY PEOPLE? It's all like this:

Actually, it's not, but this is a holiday blog, so I avert my eyes from the large piles of rubbish bags heaped outside houses, homeless people, graffiti and tabloid headlines. 

Bath is really beautiful. The whole city is a World Heritage site and there must be a building ordinance directing that all buildings be constructed from Bath stone, a mellow creamy-yellow stone. 

Roman Baths looking toward Bath Abbey, completed 1499

We stayed in a small hotel called Tasburgh House, in Bathhampton. The lovely woman who owns it lived in Kirribilli for two years and would love to live in Australia. We said we would swap places with her. That was this morning, before the big drive. 

What have the Romans ever done for us?

Yesterday we visited the Roman Baths in Bath and it reminded me how much Britain lost when the legions left to fight barbarians in other bits of the Empire. Britain did not regain levels of comfort enjoyed during the Roman period until the twentieth century. That's 1500 years of catching up. The Romans had brick houses, running water and underfloor heating. When they left they took all their skills with them, including that of brick-making. I have always found it difficult to grasp that Vikings came AFTER the Romans and King Arthur came AFTER the Romans. I don't care what trendy people say about history, the fall of the Roman Empire ushered in a Dark Age. Imagine! No underfloor heating!

The large central bath in the Roman Baths. The water, gushing from deep in the earth, is very warm

If you would like to read more about Roman Britain and the fall of the Roman Empire, you can read Gibbon and then boast about your erudition or go for one of these more digestible books:

The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization  by Bryan Ward-Perkins Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins I have read the first, but not the second yet. Here is a review of the second. When Gibbon (whom I haven't read) presented the second volume of  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to his patron, the Duke of Gloucester, his Grace remarked, “Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" The day before yesterday we visited the British Museum and saw the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. We are a bit exhibitioned out at the moment, so we didn't take up the offer of an audio-tour and I wandered around feeling inurred to novelty. Until of course I saw the statue of Pan having sex with a goat.  The Museum itself is something to behold. The Great Court, opened in 2000, lends a hallowed feel to the whole building.  The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by Foster and Partners

The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization  by Bryan Ward-Perkins Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain by Charlotte Higgins I have read the first, but not the second yet. Here is a review of the second. When Gibbon (whom I haven't read) presented the second volume of  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to his patron, the Duke of Gloucester, his Grace remarked, “Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?" The day before yesterday we visited the British Museum and saw the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. We are a bit exhibitioned out at the moment, so we didn't take up the offer of an audio-tour and I wandered around feeling inurred to novelty. Until of course I saw the statue of Pan having sex with a goat.  The Museum itself is something to behold. The Great Court, opened in 2000, lends a hallowed feel to the whole building.  The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by Foster and Partners

The Fall of Rome And the End of Civilization 
by Bryan Ward-Perkins

Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain

by Charlotte Higgins

I have read the first, but not the second yet. Here is a review of the second. When Gibbon (whom I haven't read) presented the second volume of  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to his patron, the Duke of Gloucester, his Grace remarked, “Another damn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?"

The day before yesterday we visited the British Museum and saw the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition. We are a bit exhibitioned out at the moment, so we didn't take up the offer of an audio-tour and I wandered around feeling inurred to novelty. Until of course I saw the statue of Pan having sex with a goat. 

The Museum itself is something to behold. The Great Court, opened in 2000, lends a hallowed feel to the whole building. 

The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, designed by Foster and Partners

Satin, pearls and pleats

Yesterday we walked through Green Park and Hyde Park to Kensington Palace to see an exhibition about Queen Victoria's private life, which can be summed up thus: miserable, happy, miserable. She had a difficult childhood and adolescence. Her father, the Duke of York, died when she was very young. Her mother was overprotective and overbearing, she slept in a bedroom with Victoria until Victoria became Queen. She wouldn't let Victoria walk down stairs by herself in case she fell. Ever. The first thing Victoria did when she became Queen was to banish her mother from the bedroom and assert her independence. Victoria was blissfully married to Albert and completely distraught, hysterical and unmanageable when he died in 1861. He was a great loss, as he was highly intelligent and greatly respected.

Photo taken at the exhibition of Victoria and her four oldest children.

The exhibition covered Victoria's whole life and featured the room in which she was born, which was a room in a Grace and Favour apartment in Kensington Palace. Living in a palace might sound glamourous, but the reality was often quite different. The people who were granted accommodation were often cash-strapped and the apartments might be hopelessly antiquated or impractical. It was all very well having a gargantuan ex-state room at your disposal, but staring day after day at a fire-place that caters for three-foot logs you can't afford would become rather depressing, I would think. 

From Parker, S.E; Grace and Favour The Hampton Court Palace Community 1750-1950 Historic Royal Palaces

The photo above is of the Wolsey rooms in Hampton Court Palace during Lady Georgiana Peel's occupation in around 1926. Ms Parker writes, "Lady Peel disliked her apartment finding the large rooms difficult to heat". Another resident, who died in 1949, lived at Hampton Court for the whole of her 105 years. She never had a bathroom.

Victoria and Albert married in 1840.  Here is a link to a previous exhibition at Kensington Palace, of royal wedding dresses.  Victoria's dress was made from white satin woven at Spitalfields in London and exquisite English lace. It was a relatively simple dress befitting a personal occasion. 

Contrast this with the magnificence of her Coronation gown:

Yesterday we visited the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace and saw Queen Elizabeth's Coronation gown, complete with wattle emblems:

The gown was designed by Norman Hartnell and I have always thought his designs a tad dowdy, to be honest. 

I have wondered why ermine appears as it does and yesterday I discovered that ermine is made from the white winter fur of the stoat and the black dashes are actually the tails, pinned to the white fur. Not very nice. Then again, the ermines on her Majesty's train will be remembered a lot longer than the chicken I ate for dinner last night. 

Before our tour of Buckingham Palace we saw an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery of Tudor period costume. There were very strict rules about what you could wear to Court and dressing the part could be ruinously expensive, with one cloak costing as much as a house. The outfit may only be worn a few times, so the sitter would sometimes have a portrait made while wearing it, I suppose so they could laugh at themselves. Here is a link to a costume with gold spangly bits and a funny hat that a woman thought looked Turkish in 1590. This link is to a close up of a portrait of Anne of Denmark, Queen Consort of King James I. The close-up shows the waist and the top of Anne's skirt, which was draped over a frame known as a farthingale. Each pleat that you see had to be sewn when the wearer was in the dress!!! So dressing could take hours!!! Anne was wedded to her complicated skirts and farthingales, so all the women at Court had to follow suit (or skirt) and as soon as she died the ladies happily cast away the farthingales and the pleats. 

The Ritz and Flowers

No, we are not staying at The Ritz. That is the preserve of Russian oligarchs, dying baronesses and Arabian oil merchants; but the hotel restaurant has a lunch deal, £47 for three courses. Here is a picture of the restaurant:

http://www.theritzlondon.com/restaurant/dining-en.html

which looks like an early scene from La Traviata, resplendent in vivid pink velvet and gilt. It is quite beautiful, if you like Fin de Siècle flamboyance. The waiters were beautiful too. All male, under 30 and European, two to a table, wearing tails. We were given four little amuse bouche before our entree, one of which we were told contained lobster and was pink and frothy and tasted like medicine. Very disconcerting. Entree was soup, red pepper soup and for me, tomato consommé with lobster (again) and heirloom tomatoes.

Both our mains were ordinary, but dessert was a gorgeous banana souffle with banana and rum ice cream. The food is presented with great pomp. The mains were brought out covered in little porcelain hats and removed simultaneously by the spunky waiters. I had to stop myself from saying, "ta DA!" and was a little underwhelmed when I saw the chicken breast in gravy with three veg on the plate. The turnip was a tiny nouvelle one, but still. Overall the experience was worth it, just to see the Ritz, which has such famous associations.

I first visited England in about 1995 for a conference in Liverpool. I stayed at a small hotel recommended by Vogue Australia while in London. It was on Warwick Way in Pimlico and happily the name escapes me. Breakfast was served in the basement in a low ceilinged room with florescent lighting. The tea was the colour of English women before the invention of the sun-bed, the toast was burnt and soggy, which is quite a feat when you think about it. Fortunately I was so beside myself with excitement to be in London that no small inconvenience mattered, but the memory lives on.

One of the flower beds at Hampton Court Palace 

I have been trying to determine whether the quality of English food improved with my budget or independently. It is definitely the latter. I don't know the reasons for this-I started googling, "why is English food..." and the predictive text finished the sentence with"so bad?" I actually wanted to type in "why is English food so much better" and came up with this article from a food blog. And this one from the Telegraph.

These beautiful hanging baskets are everywhere

On the way to Ede and Ravenscroft we wandered into St Clement Danes, a beautiful church designed by Sir Christopher Wren, which is the central church for the RAF. We passed three Wren churches between St James Square and Chancery Lane. Wren was enchanted by Versaille and wanted to create Baroque splendour throughout London. Coincidentally, the Great Fire of London happened in 1666 and paved the way (so to speak) for him to live the dream. Eighty-seven churches were destroyed by the fire, including St Paul's Cathedral, which was much, much bigger than the new one, designed by Wren, who also designed 51 other churches. He lived until he was 91, but I still suspect any invitation was greeted with the response, "Can't. Designing a church".

St Clement Danes

Today we passed a new memorial in Hyde Park, built in 2012 in honour of the bomber pilots of the Britain and the Commonwealth that did so much to save us in WWII:

Wagner, William III and wisdom teeth

When we were in Lucerne last week, we visited the Richard Wagner Museum. The composer lived in Lucerne for six years from 1866 to 1872 in this lovely house on a peninsula near the city centre:

I haven't written about it until now because I felt very ambivalent after our visit, which included watching a documentary narrated by Kenneth Branagh about Wagner's life and work. Wagner was rabidly anti-Semitic. I knew that already, but I didn't know he took a four year break from writing music to pen an antisemitic diatribe. His admirers divorce the man from the music, but I find that difficult to do. When I was standing in his sitting room, I kept imagining Wagner, surrounded by a circle of devotees, haranguing them about the Jewish problem. He was a vile person generally and I am not so in love with his music that I can ignore that fact. Although, now I am typing this I am thinking of the aching beauty of Siegfried's Funeral March and Wagner's portrayal of strong women and I am softening. It might be a good idea to watch Stephen Fry's documentary on his struggle with loving Wagner again or read this book I found by Marc Weiner. I also found this debate in the Wagner Journal, which I started reading until one of the authors mentioned Hegel, then my eyes crossed and I stopped.

The house is on a peninsula and looks toward the Grand National Hotel, where we were staying:

Here is the view of the peninsula from our hotel:

Wagner's house is on the peninsula with the yachts and poplars.

Here is one more link, to a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the overture to Tannhäuser.

Yesterday we spent more time looking around the Baroque part of Hampton Court Palace.

We learned a bit about William III and Mary II, about whom we formerly knew virtually nothing. They were first cousins and Mary cried on her wedding day, so aghast was she at having to marry William. He was Dutch, she was English and she went to live with him in Holland(? not sure, actually, somewhere that was not England). They grew to love each other and he was devastated when she died of smallpox. Mary's sister, Anne, hated William and referred to him as "that Dutch abortion". Anne became queen after William died.

William was often off fighting unsuccessful wars in France. When he was at home, he largely eschewed the pomp and ritual that the English imported from France, such as eating in front of a crowd of onlookers and dressing in the Royal Bedchamber which contained an incredibly expensive bed that the king rarely, if ever, slept in. Comparing the Tudor and Baroque State Rooms was very interesting. In Henry VIII's day, if you wanted to meet the king, you passed through the Great Hall and one other room until you reached a smaller room to see the king. In William III's day, you went through a succession of rooms, each more grandly appointed than the next, each containing a throne (really a red chair) under a canopy, until you got to a room with another red chair with no canopy, where you would find the king. You would bow to the thrones in all the rooms even though there was no one sitting in them. One of these rooms was called the Royal Bedchamber and contained a big bed, instead of a chair and the King and Queen would sometimes sit in the bed while onlookers stood behind an elaborate gilt barrier. Surreal.

William did not like these rituals, much preferring his much smaller private rooms on the floor below. When I say small, I am serious. I have seen quite a few great houses and even the "family rooms" used today are dauntingly large. William's private rooms are warmly panelled, the walls adorned with his favourite works of art, such as these fine paintings by Corregio:

Here is a picture of King George II's Royal Bedchamber bed. It costs more than 10 small houses to construct:

Here is a painting of George's mistress, Henrietta Howard. I love the simplicity of her dress and hair:

Back to William III. Ranged around his private dining room were a series of large portraits of beautiful women in his Court, by Godfrey Kneller. I commented to the young warden looking after the room on how much each subject looked alike. She dismissed me, saying, "they are actually quite different." I think not. Here is a sample of Kneller's work:

Duchess of Mazarin

Dorothy Mason

Same, are they not? Separated at birth? The warder told me the I've-just-had-my-wisdom-teeth-out look was in then and women put "plumpers" in their cheeks to achieve the look. The expression, "speaking with a plum in your mouth" came from this period.