[Poetry is] a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
The walk ended, as all walks must, at an unexpected tea room in East Coker, being persistently undercharged for an homemade fig quiche, a vegan hot dog (with red onion pickle) and pots of tea in the sunshine.
The unexpected tea room is my favourite part of any English journey. The tea room that hoves into view at exactly the moment it shouldn’t, in exactly the place it shouldn’t, but, inevitably, must.
The contradiction, you would think, must be unprofitable for these scions of Douglas Adams’ Improbability Drive, where the laziest deus ex machina is our hard-working deity in a world predicated against the odds.
But this contradiction is exactly why these unexpected English tea rooms thrive and, being so unexpected, can be utterly relied upon.
Unexpected Four Quart£!5
Like Douglas Adams, T.S. Eliot also understood the unexpectedness of the English journey. Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, Little Gidding: the titles in Four Quartets are themselves a journey.
Burnt Norton, East Coker and Little Gidding are old time English thatch and stone, dependable, ecumenical, wrapped in a comfort blanket of bucolic countryside.
The Dry Salvages, a garbled hearing of ‘les trois sauvages’—‘the three savages’, are a rock formation off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachussetts, infamous for wrecking fishing vessels in violent storms. The unexpected.
Four Quartets was written as Eliot entered later middle age and discovered that, contrary to the disinformation put about by stairlift manufacturers, there is nothing of value in the ‘autumnal serenity and … wisdom of age’.
Elders, Eliot reports with growing consternation, have no great secrets to hand down to us, passing on only a ‘receipt for deceit’, and their age begets, not wisdom, but folly, fear and frenzy.
‘It was not,’ Eliot writes, ‘what one had expected’.
Unexpected walk
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.
My knowledge, derived from experience, of the fields and byways of the English lowlands and its villages, deceived the unfamiliar into the familiar.
In a warm haze the sultry light
Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.
But there is no pattern, for the pattern is new in every moment.
Walking in summer is not like walking in winter. Over four days of almost unbroken sunshine, I wasn’t expecting to get my feet so sodden that they wrinkled pink. But the lush young grass and cow parsley up to my ears conspired with the dewy mornings to drench my boots in a refined distillation.
With untroubled views over open country, garlic, beech and bluebell, I wasn’t expecting navigation to be so hard. The footpaths were untrampled, unreadable in places. Every field a question mark, as rights became wrongs of way, running into deadend brambles, thickets of thistles, shin-raking nettles or electric fences of cattlebeasts.
Unexpected cattlebeasts
In the field, human or beast, winter is a time for hibernation. But the hot stink of early summer, human or beast, tickles the hormones. The key is to distance yourself from biologically inaccurate catch-all terms like ‘cow’ and to correctly classify your cattlebeasts—before unlatching the field gate.
Dairy mothers are placid, calmly curious, watchful in the afternoon. But adolescents, the heifers, are troubled, unsupervised, driven to distraction from distraction by distraction—and keen to test their herd immunity against interfering walkers.
Unexpected performance
All this time, I’ve been talking backwards, from tea room in reverse.
The journey actually began on Wednesday evening in Bath, where I had been to see Ralph Fiennes give a highly improbable performance of Four Quartets.
What were the chances that a famous actor would alight upon the idea of a staged reading of a remote poetry cycle, written by an author long-dead, performed in a socially-distanced theatre only a quarter full, in a town where I had elected, before Christmas, to break my pilgrimage walk based on the titles of that same obscure poem?
The chances, both Adams and Eliot concur, were so improbable as to be almost certain.
Having listened to Alec Guinness’s somewhat sententious BBC recital, I wasn’t expecting something so conversational. But Fiennes made total sense of Eliot’s variations and abrupt shifts in tone. Like someone trying to explain the ineffable. Which is exactly what he was. For the first time, lines I’d never fully understood came swimming into clear focus.
I think he was a little ill, however. 75 minutes into the 77 minute performance, shining with rheumy fever, Fiennes took a seat at a table and you could almost see the finish line reflected in his mind’s eye. He galloped onward through the final stanza—
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started…
—and then he stopped.
A dramatic pause, we thought. He closed his eyes. A very dramatic pause. A pause so dramatic that it burst beyond the confines of the auditorium and bent the laws of space-time.
Then he began muttering the lines to himself, trying to regather the unspooled thread. The most famous line, perhaps, in the whole poem. Brainwaves pulsed from audience to actor. One man could bear the tension no longer and cried from the stalls: ‘And know…’
Fiennes opened his eyes, switched on.
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Fare forward, voyagers!
~
Huge thanks to mum, who joined me for the last couple of days of the walk. Thanks for sharing the footpaths, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, your snacks and your company!
I really liked this David, well done. My favourite parts: how you describe footpaths as ‘unreadable’; ‘The tea room that hoves into view…..’; and the paragraph beginning ‘Evercreech’: deep observations, finely crafted. I am setting up an unexpected tea – or coffee – room myself, in a church. I had no idea Ralph Fiennes did a reading of Four Quartets; that must have been something to witness! Thank you. All the best.
Thanks Julian – really glad you enjoyed this piece. Good luck with your tea-or-coffee-room – I really hope that you found my story while Googling ‘How to set up an unexpected tea room’ 😀 All the best, David
I unexpectedly came across this piece while idly, albeit dutifully out of a long-misplaced sense of patriotism, perusing Google’s summation of the US election. What are the chances, as you say, of the aging widow of a fanatic Eliot fan, herself re-reading and sometimes quoting the “farewell to poetry” written by an unlikely prosopopoeia of 20th century Weltschmerz, coming upon a such a diverting story? Probably, given the reach of Google’s bots, more likely than it would seem. In any event, I found your writing entertaining, thoughtful, and intimate. And so, despite the fact that I already subscribe to way too many newsletters, I’m subscribing to yours. I enjoy how you digress and wander and stumble and ultimately emerge from the thickets.
What a wonderful note to receive – thanks so much Kathleen! In a couple of weeks, I’ll be walking to the little church of Little Gidding, to salute the fourth of the quartets. The third may always elude me, however – Massachusetts is a long, wet, way to walk!