November Lambs to Covent Garden

We are in London, 21 November 1817, two years after Waterloo, and Charles and Mary Lamb have just moved from the relative quiet of the inns of court to ‘a place all alive with noise and bustle’, and she is loving it, as she tells Dorothy Wordsworth. The linkboys, who carried burning torches to guide the theatre-goers home, would soon be put out of business by gas lighting. Some gas lamps still illuminate parts of Covent Garden. A gas lamp, a linkboy and a candle in this illustration from the Pickwick Papers, and still people are in the dark!

At last we mustered up resolution enough to leave the good old place that so long had sheltered us—and here we are, living at a Brazier’s shop, No. 20, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, a place all alive with noise and bustle, Drury Lane Theatre in sight from our front and Covent Garden from our back windows. The hubbub of the carriages returning from the play does not annoy me in the least—strange that it does not, for it is quite tremendous.

I quite enjoy looking out of the window and listening to the calling up of the carriages and the squabbles of the coachmen and linkboys. It is the oddest scene to look down upon, I am sure you would be amused with it. It is well I am in a chearful place.

From The Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, 1796-1820 , edited by E. V. Lucas.

Now, of course, it’s black cabs and Uber! Enjoy the Gas lights of an evening visit to Covent Garden.

Gathered together on a Winter’s morning.

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Walking to work yesterday – we were rained off before we began – I heard a chattering and a chittering from this squadron of starlings, planning their day’s foraging.

The spider finds a home

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The wall is not going to win prizes for its brickwork, but the cracks and crevices provide shelter for many creatures including a trapdoor spider. It’s probably hibernating a few centimetres back from the doorway.

Autumn Rains

The autumn rains swelled the river which runs left to right behind the iron fence in this picture. The water wasn’t deep enough to close the park but there were near-perfect reflections of the bench and bushes on this windless morning, earlier this week.

Gilbert White’s tenpenny nails.

A flint wall in Kent, fastened with our version of ‘tenpenny nails’, smooth pebbles from the beach or riverbed.

18th Century scientist and clergyman Gilbert White included in his Natural History of Selborne a survey of the local area around his home village in Hampshire, a chalk and limestone area like Kent. Hampshire is on the South Downs, Kent on the North.

In Wolmer-forest I see but one sort of stone, called by the workmen sand, or forest-stone. This is generally of the colour of rusty iron, and might probably be worked as iron ore; is very hard and heavy, and of a firm, compact texture, and composed of a small roundish crystalline grit, cemented together by a brown, terrene, ferruginous matter; will not cut without difficulty, nor easily strike fire with steel.

Being often found in broad flat pieces, it makes good pavement for paths about houses, never becoming slippery in frost or rain; is excellent for dry walls, and is sometimes used in buildings. In many parts of that waste it lies scattered on the surface of the ground; but is dug on Weaver’s-down, a vast hill on the eastern verge of that forest, where the pits are shallow, and the stratum thin. This stone is imperishable.

From a notion of rendering their work the more elegant, and giving it a finish, masons chip this stone into small fragments about the size of the head of a large nail; and then stick the pieces into the wet mortar along the joints of their freestone walls: this embellishment carries an odd appearance, and has occasioned strangers sometimes to ask us pleasantly, ‘whether we fastened our walls together with tenpenny nails.’

“The Natural History of Selborne” by Gilbert White

This old wall in Kent is made of a quite different stone: flint, but it will be seen that Kentish builders, too, liked to fasten their walls together with tenpenny nails!

On velvet paws

Your kit sits quietly on your knee
While you brush and groom her silken fur,
Accepts a ribbon around her neck,
Subsides into a contented purr:

 A perfect house cat. Yet I saw her
Yesterday, creeping over the verge,
Belly to earth, lifting paw by silent paw,
Living her own life,gripped by the urge,

The killing urge,to do as cats must do.
No prey I saw - no bird, vole or mouse -
But she sprang, clapped paws twice,leapt,and slew
A cricket! Oh, velvet killer of your house!

Aglais Io

Opened
it lay before me on the path:
earth’s lightest book —
it has but two pages.
Filled with wonder I read its magic signs.
Then it ascended into the air.
No apocalypse.
Only a couple of words from summer’s
secret revelation:
Aglais io, peacock butterfly.

Christine Busta (1915–1987)

 Photograph: Didier Descouens – Own work; copied from wikipedia.

Thank you to Bishop Erik Varden for sharing this poem on his Coram Fratribus blog.

On the Hill-side

By Radcliffe Hall:

A Memory

You lay so still in the sunshine,
So still in that hot sweet hour—
That the timid things of the forest land
Came close; a butterfly lit on your hand,
Mistaking it for a flower.

You scarcely breathed in your slumber,
So dreamless it was, so deep—
While the warm air stirred in my veins like wine,
The air that had blown through a jasmine vine,
But you slept—and I let you sleep.

It quite possibly was a gate-keeper butterfly that landed on the hand of the poet’s companion, a creature of the forest edge, as the name suggests. A sung version of this played on the radio this morning: ‘You lay so still in the sunshine’ by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

The hawks’ return

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It was i July last year that I met this sparrowhawk on our city street. I guess it was a young bird, as the intruding magpie seemed to flummox him until I came on the scene. Hawk and prey into the brambles, magpie off to scavenge elsewhere. And I into town.

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In the year since then, disaster befell the hawk. About 30 metres from this picture, taken by the back gate of a plumber’s merchant’s warehouse, the hawk was found dead by the showroom door, its breast ripped apart by another predator.

We thought it most likely he had swooped down on another little bird and hit the plate glass window at speed, breaking his neck. A handful of neighbours at least mourned his passing.

Two days ago a partly dismembered collared dove lay on the pavement not far from the original encounter. As long as a certain neighbour continues to feed the birds so generously, I think we can say we have our sparrowhawk back!

10 July: Seeing Calais and France for the first time

In 1660 it was clear that Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard did not have the confidence of the Parliament, the people, nor, crucially, the Navy and Army. Charles II, son of the executed Charles I, was on the Continent, hoping to return in peace, without fighting. A large contingent of the Navy was at anchor in the Downs, sheltered water opposite Deal, near Dover. Samuel Pepys, a young and talented civil servant was on board the Nazeby with Lord Sandwich, a senior official involved with the delicate negotiations to bring the King home and restore civilian government.

It was not all work and no play:

“This afternoon I first saw France and Calais, with which I was much pleased, though it was at a distance.” (from “The Diary of Samuel Pepys” by Samuel Pepys, 9.4.1660.

I still get a thrill to see France, here at Dover Castle evidenced by an horizon that is thicker where the hills and cliffs of the Pas de Calais stand tall.

We pray for peace in Britain and Europe, and we pray that the thrill of going to new or old holiday destinations becomes the enjoyment of the company of our dear ones, an enjoyment that passes over into the coming months back home.