A POOR MAN IN RICHMOND

Last weekend I played the part of a walking author, leading a guided walk around Richmond for Books on the Rise bookshop.

 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

I was a little worried about this since I know next to nothing about Richmond and despite a couple of reccies (one of them op cit) I hadn’t come up with a grand idea, but then, as inspiration often comes out of desperation, I suddenly thought and announced to the ten or so people who’d turned up for the walk, that since I was so ignorant of local conditions, they should guide me.  They seemed to fall for it, at least nobody demanded their money back (not that I was getting any of their money).

 

I wasn’t entirely inert.  This was going to be my walk rather than theirs, and one of the things I do as a walker, is look at a map and if I find a street with an unusual or engaging name, I go there.  And so my/our walk started in a street called The Vineyard, which led eventually to a street named Mount Ararat Road. 

 

Off we went.  There was no actual vineyard visible in the Vineyard, though there was The Vineyard Community Centre, and there were vines growing up several of the houses, and there was no sign of the flood in Mount Ararat Road, though there was a dentist’s surgery called the Ark,

 and in the front gardens there were a surprising number of olive trees.

 

We wandered for 90 minutes or so, not quite aimlessly, and eventually we ended up in Paradise Road at the house where Virginia and Leonard Woolf set up the Hogarth Press, with a blue plaque framed by a lot of wisteria.  There was wisteria everywhere in Richmond.

 

Of course we saw things we hadn’t expected to see; a phone box that had a dial tone and so may even have been functional, 

 

Photo: Jen Pedler

an almost armillary sphere,

 

the occasional liminal space, 

 

and the biggest rosemary hedge I think I’ve ever seen.

 

I think the walk worked, to the extent that a couple of the walkers did say to me, ‘Oh, I walk around here all the time but you’ve made me see things I’ve never seen before.’  That, obviously pleased me, though in my modesty I’d say I hadn’t made anybody do anything, but I’d created the conditions that allowed people see for themselves. Hey, it’s what I do.

Photo: Caroline Gannon

 

 

 

 

 

WALKING IDLY

It’s a good long time since I last watched The Fallen Idol, the 1948 film directed by Carol Read, based on the short story ‘The Basement Room’ by Graham Greene, who was also one of the writers of the screenplay.

 

Almost unbearable, so not unbearable, so the suspense is actually bearable.

My memories of course are patchy but I do recall the staircase.  Note to self: no good ever comes from living in a house that has a staircase like this.

 

And I do recall the young lad who’s at the centre of the film wandering around London at night in his pyjamas.

I thought it was pretty good film, but only now however many years after seeing the it, I got around to I reading the Graham Greene short story on which it’s very, very loosely based.  

 

The first thing to note is that everything in the film is much posher than in the book.  The house has become an embassy, Baines the butler who’s a bit of a rough diamond in the book has become Ralph Richardson, the little boy Philip has become Philippe and developed a French accent, but the stuff about walking is oddly consistent between book and film.

 

In the story, Philip ‘wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again as he looked this way and that, it was life he was in the middle of.’

 

Then, ‘He was wearing pyjamas and bedroom slippers when he came up into the square but there was no one to see him. He explored the garden: it didn’t take long, a twenty yard square of bushes and plane tress, two iron seats, and a gravel path and a padlocked gate … But he couldn’t stay …’

 

Then gradually he loses his nerve and becomes frightened. ‘At first he feared that someone would stop him. After an hour he hoped that someone would.’

 

Finally he sits on a step and cries, and a policeman sees him, takes pity on him and takes him to the police station, though that doesn’t make matters any better at all.

 

Once when I was a kid, probably about the same age as Philip/Philippe, I got separated from our family group on our day at the seaside, I think it was probably Bridlington. It wasn’t night and I wasn’t in pyjamas, but I’ve never felt so lost and hopeless, and I did start crying, but nobody, least of all a policeman, took pity on me.  I simply wandered around hopelessly and eventually spotted a member of the family, my cousin Margaret.  Of course she hadn’t even noticed that I’d gone missing.

 

 

THE PERFUMED SUBURB

 For my sins, which I would say are not especially heinous, and to plug my new book, which is hardly a sin at all in a writer, I’ve agreed to conduct a literary walking tour in Richmond, for Books on The Rise bookshop, though not for a week or three.

 

Knowing next to nothing about Richmond, I went down there at the weekend, with my trusty amanuensis, to do a reccie and hope for inspiration.  I knew there were some literary connections with Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Dickens and Pope, but that all seems a bit done.  And I had been there once and seen the obelisk in the deer park, but I accept that not everyone shares my intense love of obelisks.

And then something clicked.  I happen to remember that Sir Richard Francis Burton had gone to school in Richmond, and more than that, his archive was housed in the Orleans House Gallery, though I’d only ever seen it online.

And prize of the collection were two plaster casts, one of a Burton hand, one of a Burton foot.  I believe they were made by Albert Letchford in 1890, the year of Burton’s death.  Since Letchford painted Burton on his deathbed, I imagine he did the casts at the same time.

 

 Wouldn’t it be a fabulous climax to my walking tour, I thought, to any walking tour, to end up staring at a plaster cast of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s foot?

 

So we set off from Richmond station, down the main street, heading for Orleans House, over the river, through Marble Hill Park.

 

Of course I hoped to spot some curiosities along the way, and obviously I think walking is all about finding curiosities: as with all these things, the journey is in part the destination. The question is whether those things that I find curious and fascinating are the same as the things that would fascinate a group on a literary walk.

 

I mean, I was encouraged at the very start by a sign for a Nicholson’s pub, but I can see that not everybody would be.

There were a couple of gennels and I do love a good gennel, but I accept that not everybody does.

 

And I spotted another obelisk, this one on the bridge, with a stern warning:

A circuitous route also took us down Orleans Road, past some some fine, patinated garages

 

and there was a bit of post-modernity in a house designed by Evans and Shalev who also designed the Tate, St Ives.

Walking through the garden of Orleans House there were the sounds of an installation by Phoebe Boswell titled A Tree Says (In these Boughs The World Rustles) which was fine though obviously it didn’t please everybody.

As we entered the Orleans House Gallery there was no sign of Mr. Burton and his archive. An enquiry to the woman at the front desk confirmed that the collection was there but not on display, and although it could be seen on request, the gallery was in the process of changing curators so things were a bit chaotic and there’d be no chance of seeing it until the autumn.  

 

We wandered around the gallery which was fine and we did meet a guide in one of the rooms who said there’d once been a big portrait of Burton right there but the curator had taken it down.  I supposed this was the old, and soon to be departed, curator, but who knows what the new one will make of it? I don’t have enough information to say that Burton has been ‘cancelled’ but it certainly looked like he’d been sidelined.

 

         In any case my plan to conclude my literary walk with a sighting of Burton’s plaster foot was obviously not going to come off.  I need a Plan B.  I’m working on it.

 

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

 I don’t imagine this is the worst ever description in a novel of a woman’s walk, but it’ll do for now:

 

“You walk with a headlong rush, there is an electric energy in you, a rhythm that gushes from your mouth in a broken Bronx college-girl jargon, that tilts your narrow hips, that drives the blossoming female bulge of you, full and achingly free beneath the black skirt."

 

It’s from Evan Hunter’s Buddwing, a novel that in general I’m inclined to like, not least because it has a fair amount of walking in it, but even so I mean really.

 

Others must have liked the book too. It was made into a film as Mister Buddwing, starring James Garner (who hated the end result), with Jean Simmons, Suzanne Pleshette, Angela Lansbury and Katherine Ross.  The description above describes a character named Janet, played by Katharine Ross.

 

It has not been easy to find a good picture of Katherine Ross walking.  Here she is in Mister Buddwing with Garner:

 

and here she is shopping in Malibu (during Covid, I imagine) with her husband Sam Elliott:

 

And here she is some time ago by herself.  I’ll leave you to decide about the blossoming female bulge.

AIRY BUT NOT FAIRY

 Just so that the blog is current

herewith the new Nicholson tome, well its cover image anyway.

It's 'available' from today, though the official publication date is August 28th

Go on, you know you want to