Land and its stories by Gillian Polack

When I was a child, my mother (a science teacher) tested her excursions during the school holidays. We didn’t just go to Ballarat (an old gold town in Victoria), then, we visited the town and the museum and then walked through an old mine. We went to Vaughn Springs and panned for gold and gems. I normally sum this up as going to the beach to study the ecology of rockpools, but today I’m not interested in rockpools. 

What I saw when I was a child was what mining did to landscapes. It created tunnels and hills and dredged streams deeper or reshaped them. In one of my childhood landscapes, the streams had been destroyed entirely in the search for gold. I looked at small hills and, as a child brought up on English books, I loved them. Then Mum explained those hills and I found out that, in the making of a tiny hilled landscape, everything had been destroyed. The water from local streams had been targeted to help force the gold out under pressure. Those small hills everywhere were the refuse from the urgent search for gold. There was so much destruction in the old goldfields that it wasn’t until later that I learned how to interpret landscapes. Mining can leave land permanently changed.

Interpretation is important. And one never stops learning. Earlier this year, I read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? This book questioned the way we interpret the Australian landscape historically. I realised that I’d factored mining into my interpretation of agriculture, but hadn’t considered the wider ramifications of farming before the early 1800s in exactly the same place. The mining had obliterated a lot of the evidence of farming, but Pascoe found more evidence in explorer’s journals and records from early European settlement. 

This was in my mind when I went to Amiens this July. I only returned last week, so it’s very fresh.

The cathedral in Amiens. It survived the wars.

I was investigating a heap of things for a heap of reasons, but when I began my research a few months ago, I realised that the debris of World War I lies on Somme landscape the way the debris of goldmining lies on the Victorian goldfields. I needed to understand three periods in that region (the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century, and the end of World War II) but before I could interpret them, I had to understand World War I.

My big advantage in the interpretation is that it’s a centennial year: everyone was willing to talk with me and the museums were stuffed with information. There were pictures of before and after, for example, for bombed sites and for major battlefields. I could take all this out and catch a train and visit a once-destroyed town and check out the fields and wander the streets of Amiens and interpret… everything.

I thought you might like to see some of the things I saw. This is not a complete guide. Not even close to one, in fact. This is one small element and even that element is something I’ll be processing what I saw until I’ve finished the novels I’m working on. Maybe longer. It will take far more than a blogpost to explain that landscape.

My focus today, then, is on the effect of World War I on the area of the Somme around Amiens. I went up to two trainstops away in more than one direction to see what I could see.

The first thing that struck me was the missing places. There are some complete landscape changes in the region. Some of it is the usual (villages deserted because the people moved elsewhere) but in the Somme region, there is a very disturbing type of desertion. The satellite map shows places where trains and roads still do not go. This is the worst remaining parts of the Zone Rouge. The Zone Rouge was much larger a hundred years ago, but the web tells me it will take 700 years before every part of the battlefront region from World War I is liveable again.

The Red Zone is that part of the front line that was so destroyed by battle that it needed to be mended before it could be lived in. I visited part of it that had been mended and looked at maps of those parts that I can’t get to.

This is a street in a torn named Albert, which was rebuilt almost from scratch. 

“You can’t live here, it’s dangerous” was the official word. 

“It’s home,” said the locals and rebuilt.

I visited because that rebuild was so important to me for so many reasons. It reminded me that houses are not the only thing in a hometown. Places of beauty and places of awe make a difference, too. Albert has all of these. It was mostly built in the 1920s, but it remembers the earlier past through its landmarks.

Each place in a ruined landscape makes different decisions or has decisions made for them. I talked to a potter in Amiens, and he told me about his family. Their town was never rebuilt. There’s a museum there, he said, but there are no trains or buses. Also no residents. His family moved to Amiens because there was nothing left for them.

Not everything is destroyed on or near a military front line ,even one as destructive as that in World War I. Amiens was partly destroyed, Bits of it are old. Bits of it are new. Bits of it are rebuilt in older styles, in an attempt to not lose its past. Amiens has an important history and a lot of rebuilders commemorated that history by having houses that have an earlier ‘feel’ or that take  stones and carvings from the rubble and make them part of a home. I have hundreds of pictures of Amiens, because its way of balancing survival and rebuilding and moving forward is very much its own. This means that the city’s character emerges in all the sectors of the town, whether they’re the once-a-citadel or whether they’re tourist sections or whether they’re remnants of the nationally important seventeenth century place.

Amiens added to this complex streetscape as part of its commemoration of World War I. It has photographs of the war telling stories using the streetscape. Those pictures show us who fought; they show us the damage: they remind us that scars do not heal easily.

It’s easier to think that war is past if one lives on the other side of the world. It’s harder if one sees a new house where the family home once rested. It’s much harder still if one looks at a plantation of pines that once held the town one’s family had lived in for generations.

Something that tangles the Somme landscape is the sorrowful tourism for families of soldiers.  People from outside the region want to see the destroyed landscape. Only some of them have interest in the region itself. Right now, there are Aussies everywhere, retracing the tracks of their fallen relatives. It’s become a replacement industry for the region, making up for everything that was lost in World War I and then World War II.

This is not new. The extent of the tourism is something that’s only a hundred years old, but the memory of war in what used to be Picardy is not new at all. This landscape is scarred because of where it is and how rich the soil is. Some of the best farmland. Old cultures, cool people. And so it has suffered in war after war after war. The stuff, in fact, of stories. Some of the great French battle epics are set in this part of France. English-speakers think of the English/French interface. Readers of Dumas think of La Rochelle. Everyone thinks of Paris. But this area has a special history and the landscape is much harder to read because of this history. 

What looks like fields and forest may also be layers of buried sorrow.

A delicate exotic fruit.....by Adèle Geras

Lady Bracknell said it, in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. "Ignorance, " she pronounced "is  a delicate exotic fruit. Touch it, and the bloom is gone."

I am aware that many writers on this blog are immensely knowledgeable about different periods of history and that my studies haven't taken me nearly as deep as they ought to have done, but  I enjoy contributing as an interested amateur. My understanding of the history of the Netherlands comes from reading, a long time ago, Simon Schama's excellent book, An Embarrassment of Riches.  I have also, of course, read Tracy Chevalier's lovely The Girl with the Pearl Earring and most recently, Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist.  Through these books, and of course, even earlier through the Diary of Anne Frank which I read as a teenager, I had an affectionate regard for the Netherlands in general and Amsterdam in particular.

I've just come back from four days in that city and I'm in love. It's a marvellous place, as anyone who's been there knows, and on the basis of this very short visit, I'd like to write about two things. The second is ART (and again, I have only general and not specialised knowledge of this) and the Oude Kerk.

This place is the oldest building in the city. It used to be a Catholic church and then after the Reformation, it became a Calvinist one. My companion, the illustrator Helen Craig particularly wanted to see it because she'd visited it years before and was impressed. So we set out on foot, from very near the Anne Frank house. We walked and walked. Tourist arrows showed us the way, but we did find ourselves going back and round and about and in the end, it took us a long time to find the Oude Kerk even though it is enormous and imposing .We came upon it after asking for directions several times. This is apparently normal. The delightful guide begins: "It may have taken a while to find it, but you've made it. Amsterdams's  Oude Kerk is one of the city's best kept secrets."

There was an organ playing when we were there. Someone was rehearsing for a concert. The  high pale columns support a vaulted roof. Saskia Rembrandt is buried here. Rembrandt and his family worshipped here. Nowadays it is a space for cultural events of every kind. We walked round an  exhibition of photographs and marvelled at images from all over the world celebrating Lesbian Gay and Transgender life. Everything was calm and beautiful and still very church-like. The Oude Kerk has changed through the centuries. In the Middle Ages, it was the busy centre of a growing town. In the Golden Age (17th Century) wealthy trade guilds supported the church and it became a hub for commerce and trade. Today, (and I found this very heartening and somehow moving) it's in the Red Light district. On our way there, on our long walk, we saw pretty young women in bras and panties (they were too lacy and colourful to be 'knickers' ) smiling in the windows of houses where some of the red curtains were drawn shut. These were the sex workers, and it seemed to me that their work was being as respected as anyone else's work, and that the people who passed their windows who were not interested in a sexual transaction were friendly and accepting. A  business that could have been sleazy and unpleasant was rendered ordinary and less threatening than it could have been. At no time did Helen and I feel in the least uncomfortable. The women smiled at us as we went by and some even waved. I suppose they are used to the curious glance of strangers, but from the passers-by, I saw neither disapproval or embarrassment on public display. 

There are  beautiful stained glass windows in the Oude Kerk but the one that I liked was a  kind of stained glass collage of bits and pieces that were salvaged when they were restoring the ancient windows. 

And I loved the modern tapestry of the seat cushions, done in shades of pale grey and sage green in  a kind of willow pattern.

I can't resist saying an ignorant word about the Dutch art that I saw. I came away full of admiration, not only for Vermeer (whose Girl with the Pearl Earring is as beautiful as I expected but almost eclipsed, even so, by the transcendent View of Delft on the opposite wall)  and Rembrandt, but also for a whole raft of others, whose names are daunting but who are well worth investigating. Artists like van der Velde, Mignon, de Heem, and van Ruisdael. It seemed to me that they were portraying a world that was basically a good and respectable one;  a world based on trade, and farming, and flowers and good governance. Yes, Holland was an imperial power and doubtless that history must have its own share of darkness, but what we mostly see is a place where order and serenity were valued. Of course, death and murder  are part of every society, but here it seems the main impulse was towards the light. What is depicted is a  place where everyone, whoever they were, had a right to a good life. We associate Holland with tulips and cheese and that cliché says something true about the country: wholesomeness and beauty and a kind of sanity which we only appreciate when we consider other kinds of societies, past and present.

I'm going to finish with a little picture show of some of the  things I like best, including, in the Mauritshuis café the best ever Hazelnut Meringue in the whole world and a live flower arrangement in the tradition of those glorious flower paintings of the 17th century. 

This is the cake....

This is from a series of battle scenes by van de Velde, in the Rijksmuseum,  done in pen and black ink on canvas. They were stunning.

 

And here is that flower arrangement. 

Next, a haunting collection of lovely dresses in the Rijksmuseum which also incidentally has the best tomato soup I've ever had. 

I will be going back. And meanwhile I will plant the tulip bulbs I bought in the Tulip Museum and wait for them to bring to my garden next spring a serene and harmonious kind of beauty which  I think of as particularly Dutch.

Packing Shed Island - a Landscape with Oysters, by Penny Dolan

Writers tend to steal landscapes, laying places down in the mind until they are ready for revisiting in fiction.  I’m huddled over another idea right now, but the landscapes keep arriving, ready for whenever they might be needed for some fiiction in the future. 

There’s time, and there’s place. 

The afternoon was the last of a golden August, and we were at a good friend’s birthday celebration. There was a lot of waiting around, so I started to think – as one does – about the passing of time, not only birthday musings but also about the place under my feet: an island off the Essex coast, known as Mersea.

Earlier that week, looking for somewhere to stay near Mersea, I’d studied maps of the Essex coast, a ragged region of land and water.  The oozy rivers and the flat, marshy tongues of mud stretch far out into the sea. Small harbours and villages that look close neighbours by boat can be hours away by road, especially in the past.   

Any map of the coast itself, with its many inlets, mudbanks and tides, suggests how easily people and goods could travel in or out of the area, as long as you had a trustworthy or well-paid local guide or pilot.   

With no disrespect, the wildness of the coast suggests a place for unseen arrivals and departures, for plots and plans. There are no cliff-top coastguard paths looking down on the waterways here. 

West Mersea, the island’s harbour, was a mix of well-worn boats, a few hulks and gleaming craft whose masts rattled in the brisk breeze. Our friends live in the old harbour, in the handful of original cottages set beyond the sea wall. 

As we were ferried towards the party, the outlines of the newer Mersea showed in the clustered architecture of the thirties, forties and fifties. The community that had lived from the sea made a living from now-mobile holidaymakers and caravanners.

We arrived, on a low tide, at Packing Shed Island, the raised, dry mud bank in the middle of the tidal waterway.  There you stepped into water and mud and history. Under your shoes were crunched shells of all sorts, left over from past oyster boat hauls. 

Ahead, raised on its legs, was the wooden Packing Shed, crowning the ridge.  When the original shed was built, in 1890, oysters were a flourishing trade and sixty men and boys worked on the island.

Over on the far side were the remains of the square oyster “tanks”, where the oystermen rested their catches. Some lay partially filled with water, some looked ready to disappear under an unusually high tide. 

The oysters were left in their shells in the tanks, so the tides could wash in and out, believing the seawater cleansed the shellfish of all impurities. Now, a local explained, all oysters are “washed” by UV light to kill all the bacteria.  I still didn’t feel hungry. 

I admit to shivering slightly as I write this, because only last night I read about Execution Dock where the bodies of seafaring malefactors were left until three tides had washed over them. 

The Mersea men packed the oysters in barrels for shipping by Thames barge to Billingsgate and Europe. It was a hard life: fierce storms often swept in Mersea to damage the shed, the boats and the people. A portion of the Tollesbury and Mersea Native Oyster Fishing Company’s profits was set aside for widows and orphans.

The Packing Shed, however, hasn’t been used for oysters for years.  The trade disappeared, taken away by rail, road and refrigeration. The Shed was left alone until, after the big storm of1990, local people realised that part of their history was danger of disappearing completely into the sea. A Trust was formed, funds were raised and local lads on community service were drafted in as the hard labour.  

Would current health, safety and claims rules scupper such a hands-on scheme now. Would there be a tick-box for risk of death by drowning? Would this make good story . . .?

Quick, back to party time. By now, a single-seater plane was flying in joyful acrobatics across the blue sky. I can’t have been the only one to whom, even among the admiration and happiness, those billowing smoke-trails brought thoughts of all the planes and pilots who’d dropped into the water off the Essex coast, unable to reach their bases?

  
Just how many centuries of history were there in that one small place and moment?

Across the water, just visible on the mainland, lay St Peters Chapel on the Wall, a tiny church founded in 653 AD by the Celtic missionary St Cedd,  sent all the way from Lindisfarne. 

The "Wall" that the chapel was built against was the remains of a Roman fort.

Once upon a time, I was told, St Peter's Chapel at Bradwell had been two miles inland. Now a breakwater of vast concrete blocks lay off-shore, protecting the holy place for a while longer.  

 I’d like to visit that little chapel sometime soon.

Meanwhile, not far from the chapel’s stone tower was a far larger building of grey brutalist concrete: Bradwell Nuclear Power Station, built in 1962 and decommissioned in 2006, It sits there, as most such power stations do, on the sea’s ever shifting edge. 

 Dystopia, anyone?

Hoping, once again, that energy planners and politicians did think about the long tides of history, I turned back, rather thankfully, to the party.

Penny Dolan