Favourite Gardens - Redenham Park

Redenham Park

Redenham Park, west of Andover, is an C18th Georgian house built for the Pollen family (Richard Pollen, was an old friend from the Meon Valley) and was also home to the Hambro's until it was acquired by Sir John Clark, the industrialist, famous for his long battle with Sir Arnold Weinstock. His widow, Lady Olivia Clark has created a beautiful garden behind the house over the past 40 years, notably for its huge yew hedges and topiary  It's fortunately open for the National Gardens Scheme once or twice a year.  

Lady Olivia Clark

For more photos from 2019 click here 

For more photos from 2018 click here

The Mystery of the Plaque and the Severed Head

 

The Mystery Plaque

This plaque, which stands on a table on the loggia at Old Swan House, lead to the following correspondence between Guy Boney, another friend and me in January 2021: 

'Guy, I trust that your ‘A' Ladder schooling is equal to the task of identifying this chap - and the remains of the chap who’s head he’s holding - both of whom whom rest on a bas relief cast on a plaque in my loggia. The main character appears to be a satyr - or might even be the great god Pan, judging by his hairy withers - but my ‘B’ Ladder and Graham Drew schooling fails me when it comes to identifying the allusion.  Perhaps the animal skins draped over his left arm are the key. Anyway, your thoughts are awaited with interest'.

To which Guy replied:

'Hm, v. interesting.  

The bloke with the hairy withers is undoubtedly Pan - Greek god of flocks, shepherds etc.indeed god of everything connected with the countryside and pastoral stuff, including hunting.   My long-unthumbed classical dictionary says he is usually represented as a sensual being with horns and goat’s feet, sometimes in the act of dancing - the lump in his forehead I think must be intended to represent a horn/antler, and he has something like a shepherd’s staff tucked away somewhere into his kit.   The tails of the cat(s) or whatever the headed animal is illustrate his interest in hunting, pastoral activities and so on.    All pretty clear so far.

I think the interesting bit is the identity of the apparently beheaded character.   I think the answer is Socrates, which is partly wild guess, partly a memory of having seen a bust of him (Roman, not Greek, so 4-500 years after his death) somewhere or other.   But his main characteristic (apart from a reputation for wisdom - put about in a big way by Plato in the Republic and the series of Socratic dialogues written by Plato, e.g. the Crito which we did exhaustively up to the head man) was of physical ugliness - “in features he is represented as having been singularly, even grotesquely, ugly with a flat nose, thick  lips and prominent eyes”, says my dictionary, and you can see he's hardly Greek god material as shown in your stoneware.   

He died in 399 BC at the age of about 70  i.e. right at the end of the Peloponnesian War and at the end of the golden fifth century which saw the building of the Parthenon (450 BC), the plays of Aeschylus and the comedies of Aristophanes.   Aristophanes, always good for a satirical laugh, took Socrates apart in The Clouds, in rather the same way as W.S.Gilbert took apart Oscar Wilde in Patience by caricaturing him as the poet Bunthorne (“…if you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your medieval hand…And everyone will say as you walk your flowery way….”).

Poor old Socrates meanwhile was condemned after a trial in 399 to death  by drinking hemlock.   He had come badly unstuck by becoming involved in Athenian war politics and making an enemy of the wrong person (lucky he didn’t try his luck on Stockbridge Parish  Council, but the result wd probably have been the same).    He was charged with impiety and not worshipping the gods of the city (chief amongst whom was Athena - sounds like a stitch-up already), and with introducing new deities and also of being a corrupter of youth.  I don’t think, btw, that last bit implies the usual thing, i.e. he doesn’t seem to have been an enthusiastic shirt-lifter (and I can’t find the classical Greek for that), but he was friendly with one or two people who were, mainly a character called Alcibiades who brought a number of people down.

To get away from fascinating C4BC Athenian gossip and back to the main point, I think the clues to this are the identification of Pan (a slightly disreputable god in C4 Greek terms), and the fact that Pan is holding aloft the bust of Socrates in, perhaps, apparent veneration.   That would be a fine example of Socrates doing exactly what he was condemned to death for,  i.e. encouraging the worship of a new, unconventional and too-exciting, non- establishment god (Pan) and having an arguably corruptive influence on the young by doing so.

There is a fair amount of speculation in all that, but you did ask for my thoughts and it does more or less hang together.   An important factor of course is the origin of your piece of stoneware - is it ancient or modern?   It doesn’t strike me as being a standard-issue chunk of garden-centre central-casting classical sculpture - it seems too sophisticated for that because it  seems to betoken some degree of classical knowledge which nowadays no one has .   It may hark back to the C19 or possibly even a grand tour C18 handout.   Any ideas of where it came from?  Perhaps it’s an Eve Lane special!

Best,  Guy'

This was followed by this note to a friend with whom I was also discussing the plaque, and copied to Guy:

'I have at last heard from of our local classical scholar with his considered views on that rather ugly piece in my loggia, and fortunately it seems that our own education isn’t found completely wanting in that it’s 
a) not something that every snotty schoolchild has doodled in his Kennedy’s Primer since Remove; and 
b) might even said to be a bit of a conundrum to those who read Greek and Latin up to the head man at school (the one who was more remembered for his pretty daughter Polly than his magisterial translation of Plato’s Republic). So, 

a) honour is intact, and 

b) the game is still on to prove or disprove Guy’s current theory involving Pan and his veneration of Socrates.

I support his theory, tempered only by the fact that Socrates died from being made to drink hemlock, the C4th BC equivalent of a gallon of retsina, rather than being beheaded, but I will allow that this could just be a good example of artistic licence. After all, a prone body would hardly fit the design required tempt a C18th traveller - which is what I think we have here.

The piece was actually bought from a Jewish antique-dealer friend called Kuka Steiner, from whom we acquired quite a few of the more unusual pieces you can find dotted around the house, including the zebra skin that you will have almost tripped on more than once and which will probably be the death of me. He lives in France and Spain but is still a friend and in fact he was in touch over Christmas, so there it may be worth asking him to come clean about its provenance and which ancient collection he ‘acquired’ it from. As I say, my guess is that it’s the equivalent of a tourist trophy brought back by someone who took an obligatory C18th Grand Tour and was sold something more portable than the Elgin Marbles just to show his long-suffering parents that he hadn’t spent all his time among the flesh-pots of Paris, and had it mounted.

In fact, there is more - a reverse side - the design of which to my mind supports the Socrates theory as it seems to me to depict the owner of the severed head on the other side - who could be Socrates in full declamation mode - with what looks like a representation of the cave in which he was imprisoned - a curious chamber hewn out of the rock close to the Acropolis, as I recall from this photo taken when I was supposed to be doing some work down there'.

Socrates's cave in Athens 

Guy's response:

'The sight of the flip side of your hunk of antiquity from the Acropolis sent me scurrying back to the classical Dicker (a favourite subversive Badcockism on A ladder aimed at Gerry Dicker whom he loathed, as in “hand me the dicker, Boney”) and I agree the full passage there confirms the Socrates identification, because you will notice the old geezer appears to be barefoot, to the point where you can actually see his toenail (at least I think it is; it can’t be anything else).  The full passage which refers to his ugliness and grotesque appearance reads:

“…His physical constitution was robust and wonderfully enduring.   He went barefoot in all seasons of the year, even during the winter campaign in Potidaea, under the severe frosts of Thrace; and the same homely clothing sufficed for him in winter as well as in summer…..”,and there follows the  bit about him being grotesquely ugly.  He certainly appears dressed for the outdoors, a feature to which the sculptor seems keen to draw attention. 

I have tried to trace some reference to the hockey stick thing crowned with a kind of fleur-de-lys which he has in his left hand, because in classical sculpture these things when included are always there to make a nudge-nudge point.   For example, all the sculptures/images depicting  Hercules/Heracles always have him clutching or wearing a lionskin, I think from memory because one of his twelve labours involved him in sorting out an animal called the Nemean lion, presumably because it was giving a hard time to the people in Nemea (wherever that is).   

So the hockey stick is likely to have significance, and the fact that the dicker is silent on its significance to Socrates is a point suggesting that the image may not be Socrates after all. I will continue researches, and your dealer friend’s recollection of where it came from would be interesting. The c18 grand tour is the most likely source but it may in the end be worth consulting the antiquities department at Sothebys - but only if its provenance is squeaky-clean. They can be a bit twitchy about that sort of thing these days.'

Best, Guy

Since these exchanges, another friend, an art historian of some note, has opined that the figure we think is Pan, might instead be his son, Silenus. We will never know.

And there, for the moment, the. matter rests.

John Le Carre remembered by Matthew d'Ancona December 2020

David Cornwell 1931 - 2020

John le Carré was much more than the greatest chronicler of the Cold War. He saw the fault-lines in all that followed – and warned us of them till the end

“An unmitigated clusterfuck bar none.” Thus does one of the main characters in John le Carré’s final novel, Agent Running in the Field (2019), pithily summarise Brexit.

The book’s narrator, Nat, describes the Conservative government of 2018 with equal venom: “A minority Tory cabinet of tenth-raters. A pig-ignorant foreign secretary who I’m supposed to be serving. Labour no better. The sheer bloody lunacy of Brexit.”

That “pig-ignorant foreign secretary” is, of course, now Prime Minister in real life, desperately trying to extract a last-minute trade deal from the “clusterfuck” of Britain’s departure from the European Union. It is a measure of le Carré’s determined topicality that his final espionage thriller involved not only Brexit, Trump and Russian meddling in the Western democratic process, but even EU trading tariffs. How much further enmeshed with the reality of day-to-day politics could a fiction writer in his late eighties possibly have been?

To the very last, he raged against the dying of the light by remaining implacably vigilant; furious at the indignities to which his country was being subjected by bogus patriots, spiv nationalists and sloganeering charlatans.

Last year, I wrote a piece for Tortoise about le Carré’s significance as a “Condition of England” novelist: a writer who, for six decades, provided a compelling running commentary on the state of the nation, its transformations, ambiguities, and treacheries. From Suez to the sewers of today’s populist Right rhetoric, he was always observing, tracing every oscillation between hope and disillusionment.

When I learned of his death last night, I felt a sense of personal loss that was also a moment of disclosure: that, when all is said and done, he is, and has long been, the writer that I turn to most often and instinctively to understand politics, statecraft and their very specific character in this country.

As it happens, and as if to drive home the point, I had been watching an episode of Smiley’s People (1982), the second BBC dramatisation of le Carré’s novels to feature Alec Guinness as George Smiley. But my debt stretches back much further.

I can still remember my parents discussing the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy when it was first published in 1974. Much too complex for a child, of course, but magnetic all the same: Merlin, Witchcraft, Gerald the Mole, Karla the Moscow spymaster, “chicken-feed”, lamplighters, the scalphunters, the Circus. What magic was this?

It is true that le Carré does not write often about politicians, and, when he does, he is scathing: see, for instance, the portrayal in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy of the minister Miles Sercombe, whom Smiley’s adulterous wife, Ann, once described (“proudly”) as the only one of her cousins “without a single redeeming feature”. Sercombe’s baldness, we are told, “gave him an unwarranted air of maturity,” an absurdity compounded by a “terrible Eton drawl” and his “fatuous Rolls, the black bedpan”.

Yet – for all his mockery of the political class itself – every one of le Carré’s 26 novels is, in some shape or form, about power and its exercise: about the endless, nuanced interaction between principles and ambition; between decency and (a favourite word) “larceny”; and – most complex of all – the extent to which foul deeds are justified by noble ends.

In this sense, he used the secret world as a stage upon which to explore both questions of national character, and the personal dilemmas confronted by those who find themselves embroiled in clandestine activity. Often, the price they pay is grievously high.

In Smiley’s People, it is a terrible role reversal that ensures the final defeat of Karla – “He controls the whole of Russia, but he does not exist” – as Smiley tracks down his long-time adversary’s mentally ill daughter to a Swiss clinic: “On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s land.”

Through the eyes of Smiley and many other characters, le Carré was a pitiless chronicler of national decline. In Tinker Tailor, the unmasked Soviet mole, Bill Haydon, tells Smiley that his own treachery was driven by a gradual recognition that “if England were out of the game, the price of fish would not be altered by a farthing”.

Given this metaphor, there is a bleak symmetry in the fact that, on the very day that the author died, government sources were briefing the media with the pathetic line that, if the EU and UK negotiators failed to reach a deal, gunboats would be deployed to “protect our fish”.

As a former officer of MI5 and MI6, le Carré had no time for traitors (he famously refused to meet Kim Philby in Moscow). But he never allowed his characters – or his readers – to take refuge in lazy jingoism. He understood that patriotism is meaningless if it lacks depth, reflection and a measure of uncertainty.

Nor was he a nostalgist: quite the opposite, in fact. The fall of the Berlin Wall awoke in him a great hope of a monumental rebuilding of the East – quickly dashed by what followed the historic events of 1989. In The Secret Pilgrim (1991), we are told of “Smiley’s aphorism about the right people losing the Cold War, and the wrong people winning it”.

Indeed, in novels such as The Night Manager (1993) and The Constant Gardener (2001), le Carré was quicker than most to foresee that the post-Cold War landscape would be inherited by a smug coalition of governments and corporations; that worship of reified “business” would infect public policy; and that the same breed of privately educated, endlessly charming Englishmen who had once defended the old order of the Empire and then the West against the Soviet bloc would smoothly switch their allegiance to this new and unaccountable cartel of states and plutocrats.

“The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth,” says Smiley in The Secret Pilgrim. “Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool.”

How true, yet again, that seems today, as Boris Johnson gurns his way through a crisis that will determine the trajectory of this country for decades. Not for nothing is one of le Carré’s (best, if lesser-known) novels titled Our Game (1995): a reference to Winchester College football. A fear of privileged men reducing the fate of nations to playtime runs through his work: in Tinker Tailor, Smiley imagines the mole Haydon “standing at the middle of a secret stage, playing world against world, hero and playwright in one: oh, Bill had loved that all right.”

In the end, the character of Smiley himself is le Carré’s most precious bequest to the world. He is a true public servant, reserved but never docile, unashamed of his erudition, ironic to a fault, sleeplessly aware that the world is full of lethal complexities and that those who pretend otherwise with their slogans and demagoguery are not to be trusted.

To the end of his life, le Carré understood that resilience in an age of pulverising technological and geopolitical change would require greater integrity than ever, greater wisdom, greater reflection. In Smiley, he imagined a profound form of Englishness that is worth preserving, not in spite of, but because of, its ambiguities. As Control, his mentor and boss, tells him after his first and unsuccessful attempt to ensnare Karla in Delhi: “I like you to have doubts…. It tells me where you stand.”

In le Carré’s penultimate novel, A Legacy of Spies (2017) – a coda of sorts to The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963), the book that made his name – Peter Guillam, Smiley’s closest disciple, tracks him down to a library in Freiburg. Unbidden, the elderly spy tries to explain why he did what he did with his life.

“I’m a European, Peter. If I had a mission – if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.”

Those final, spare words read today – amid the infantile bedlam of Brexit – less like an elegy for something unrecoverable than le Carré’s mission statement for future generations. It’s a fine one, too. RIP.

Matthew d’Ancona