The Old Normal

We venture out. As a whole family. The teenagers are a bit nervous: since the Covid-19 lockdown began to ease they've seen friends in parks and gardens but none of them have been to a built-up area, let alone go into a public building, move around in the same space as other people, sit down and eat and drink in a restaurant.

The De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea has just opened up again after a long closure and we wanted to support our favourite local institution. Numbers are obviously limited so we booked online for a two-hour Sunday lunchtime slot. This gave us access to the exhibitions, the shops and the café.

When we arrive it's all very welcoming. We are asked to wear our masks in the gallery spaces and the shops but we do not have to as we move around the building or in the café. The café is where we head for first as the teenagers find it difficult to go more than two hours without food. The staff seem genuinely pleased to see us: these are their jobs and they're still here; how many jobs is the country destined to lose when the furlough scheme ends?

The food comes and the lime and coriander chicken is a hit with the carnivores; the black bean and beetroot falafels are a hit with me. The Guinness is even better: home drinking is ok but being out and having a pint feels like a liberation. We all admire an elderly gent sitting in the corner: he has a sea-facing table for one, iPad and earphones, pint of bitter. He alternates his gaze between the horizon and his screen and every so often lifts his mask to have a swig of beer. He looks inordinately happy to be out in the world. The middle teen asks me if that's what I aspire to in old age; damn right.

Afterwards we don our masks and wander through the Zadie Xa and Marc Bauer exhibitions and then the kids go off to walk along the seafront and search for ice cream. We mooch around the gift shop: my wife picks up some Eric Ravilious cards and I get a Derek Jarman book. I start to flick through the racks in the Music's Not Dead record shop, now located in the main foyer. I stay too long, obviously, and am left on my own. I buy a Fall album and find a rare Nico LP that I can justify the price of.

The two-hour slot comes to an end so I step outside into the afternoon to find the others. They are all relaxing on a wall eating 99s; the terrace bar is open and some people are soaking up the sun and the beer; a smattering of cyclists and dog walkers are parading on the promenade; this all feels (almost) like the old normal.

In the Ravilious Room

2015 was the year in which one of East Sussex’s most famous twentieth century artists became the property of the whole country. When I say ‘the country’, I mean that London finally caught up with the simple beauty of the paintings of Eric Ravilious. Ravilious, Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition, was the biggest-ever showing of his work and was a sell-out this summer; the public, the art world and the media were united in praise for this largely unsung watercolourist.

In his delightful end of year review, The Guardian’s Ian Jack wrote, “He is an easy painter to enjoy … bright and tender even in his depictions of war. His pictures give the viewer the permission to like England and to mourn it”; but not all is from a lost age. If his work as a war artist portrays the nation at a particular point of conflict, other images capture a timeless essence of England: his paintings of Sussex, the South Downs and the South Coast capture a landscape that is largely unchanged.

Born in west London in 1903, Eric Ravilious grew up in Eastbourne where his parents ran an antique shop. A scholarship boy, he was educated at Eastbourne Grammar School and Eastbourne School of Art before moving on to the Royal College of Art. Ravilious excelled in a variety of media – ceramic design, wood engraving, book illustration – but it is for his watercolours that he is mostly remembered.

At the start of the Second World War, he was commissioned as a full-time war artist; his watercolours recorded the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force in action from a number of postings around Britain and abroad. In August 1942 whilst based at Kaldadarnes in Iceland, Ravilious was on board an aircraft that went missing. After a four-day search, the aircrew were declared lost in action. Ravilious’s body was never recovered; he was 39 years old.

The Dulwich exhibition may now be over, but Eastbourne’s wonderful Towner Art Gallery holds one of the largest public collections of Ravilious’s work. The permanent Ravilious Room contains watercolours, books about the artist and a unique archive of associated materials. Currently, there are Ravilious works on display that have been loaned from Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum and it is the perfect reason to visit, particularly in this interregnum between Christmas and New Year.

When I was there today, it was one of the loaned paintings, Train Landscape, that especially caught my eye. This popular work dates from 1940, when Ravilous spent a day travelling up and down the Eastbourne to Lewes line painting the interior of the railway carriage with the landscape viewed through the window. However, the figure in this watercolour is of the Westbury Horse in Wiltshire and not the Long Man of Wilmington that was in the original work. Ravilious was very interested in the hillside chalk figures of the South Coast and painted several, including two viewed from trains; but he was dissatisfied with both and wanted to discard them. It was Tirzah Garwood, married to Ravilious, who cut and pasted together the best parts of both works to create such an enduring image of England.

Towner Art Gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday, and Bank Holiday Mondays, between 10am and 5pm. Admission is free. The gallery will be closed on New Year’s Day.

Note: The Ravilious Room will be closed from 26 January to 5 February 2016, inclusive, to change the works on display.

Orwell in Eastbourne

By its very nature as an old and established seaside resort, Eastbourne can boast some high-profile cultural connections: literary giants Charles Dickens and Lewis Carroll were regular visitors; the artist Eric Ravilious was a life-long resident and the biologist T.H. Huxley retired there, as did the journalist and literary critic, Cyril Connolly. But Connolly had lived in the town earlier in his life, at a residence he shared with a more renowned contemporary. If you walk along Summerdown Road, one of the well-heeled, tree-lined streets of the Old Town area, you will eventually come across a detached house with two rectangular blue plaques, one of which contains Connolly’s name and that of the writer, George Orwell.

The house, formerly the Headmaster’s lodge, is all that remains of St. Cyprian’s preparatory school. The main school building, where the two writers boarded between 1911 and 1916, stood to the rear of the house. It was destroyed by fire in 1939 and, subsequently, the school was closed and the playing fields sold to Eastbourne College. That less is made of Orwell’s connection to the town is probably due to the fact that he hated his time at St. Cyprian’s and, in a long autobiographical essay, laid his feelings bare. Such, Such Were the Joys – the ironic title coming from one of Blake’s Songs of Innocence, The Echoing Green – was published after his death to a polarised reception.

Writing over 25 years after the experience, Orwell’s detailing of a life of insanitary conditions, inhospitable dormitories and inedible food was recognised by some, but not by all. And it was his view of the violent regime of Mr and Mrs Wilkes, nicknamed Sambo and Flip, handing out humiliating punishments to some and lavish praise to others, that most divided former pupils. Accusing the Wilkes of fawning over the students from rich families, Orwell felt that as a scholarship boy he was cruelly treated. When he first arrived at the school as a seven-year-old, he was beaten with a riding crop so viciously that it broke. But it was his realisation that paranoia and fear were deliberately deployed by those supposed to be taking care of him that made Orwell understand the power of hierarchies. Friendless and spied upon, loneliness and a broken spirit were the outcomes.

Some of Orwell’s time in Eastbourne found its way into his fiction: in his ‘fairy tale’, Animal Farm, the local village is named after Willingdon, just to the north of town; its pub, The Red Lion, is where Farmer Jones gets drunk; and Manor Farm, where the revolution takes place, is based on Chalk Farm on the edge of the Downs. If Orwell used simple landmarks that he would have come across on ‘character-building’ walks for settings in Animal Farm, the area had a more profound effect on his final novel. The Last Man in Europe was Orwell’s original title for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and it perhaps gives us a further clue to how he felt about his time in Eastbourne. Exposed as a young child to an authoritarian regime that was, by turns, caring and violent, the sense of isolation and powerlessness that Winston Smith feels in Orwell’s most well-known novel can be traced back, in Such, Such Were the Joys, to his five long years at St. Cyprian’s.