Downland: part five

He stepped inside and, removing his hat and scarf, backed himself into the corner. Behind him the pair of windows with Matthew’s succour for strangers - the hungry, the thirsty, the cold and the lonely: ye gave me meat, ye gave me drink, ye clothed me, ye visited me. Tolerance, at best, was Ridler’s view of the hospitality that had been extended to him. This was a memorial to a Viscount’s son; retrospective earthly munificence enshrined in stained-glass - a guarantee of celestial immortality. But this felt like sanctuary; the shelter and calm tranquillity of the church.

To his right, at eye-level, was the memorial stone to Allen Cornelius Thorold Mann, son of Colonel J.R. Mann. It was too far away for Ridler to make out the inscription from his corner but he knew what it said; he had read it many times before. This Midshipman had been one of five hundred aboard when HMS Captain had foundered off Cape Finisterre in 1870. He was 19 years of age when he perished. Gladys had looked it up for him in Lewes Public Library: the ship had capsized because of design faults. Captain Cowper Phipps Coles had pursued his turret ship design in the face of naval opposition but had pushed his plan through by soliciting public and political support. Fittingly, he went down with the ship but along with four hundred and eighty others. That the folly of one could have such an impact on so many staggered Ridler. He had himself come from that background of privilege and expectation but any trace of this inheritance had long since dissipated as he set himself apart from all men; but these arrogant men in positions of power, they were still displaying their idiocy to the world.

Eden, only two years ago, had sent young British soldiers to invade Egypt and airmen to bomb Cairo. At least the villagers here - despite living in the thrall of a feudal estate - had recognised this aristocrat’s stupidity, riotously burning his effigy on Guy Fawkes’ night on the Downs that year. Ridler had seen this for himself when out nightwalking. They had looked like a torchlit mob; he felt that if they had caught sight of him, it would have been the peasants marching on Castle Frankenstein to lynch the creature. He and Gladys had seen that film at the magnificent Granada Cinema on Mitcham Road the year it had opened. The cinema was so opulent and ostentatious it had seemed like the new world had come to south London. That was probably three years before Burchett had started on his face and most of his work could be safely hidden. He could go out in public unnoticed then; by the time Burchett had finished, and Ridler had completed the transformation with piercings and dental work, America would be the only place he would find acceptance.

Hit the North!

At the top end of Hailsham High Street, next to the Green Chilli Indian takeaway, you will find Gallery North, a not-for-profit community art gallery. As well as exhibiting a wide range of artworks - paintings and photography to ceramics, printmaking, illustration and sculpture – by local artists, the gallery organises the annual Hailsham Arts Festival every September, and is an important part of the town’s landscape.

Not only does Gallery North support local schools and art groups, and run classes and workshops, but over the past year the gallery has worked with the town council to bring life to a high street blighted by recession and the economic vandalism that Tesco and Asda have wrought on the town. By displaying the work of local artists and craftspeople in the windows of the empty shops, they have revitalised the high street; and this has even extended to artists getting out onto the street to paint murals on boarded-up shop windows.

And this week, Gallery North has emerged from its deep winter hibernation with a new exhibition by East Sussex-based artists Liz and Roger Scott, Julia Desch and Angela Anstey-Holroyd. ‘Natural Textures’ is an exhibition of photography and textiles and runs to Saturday 27th April 2013. The gallery is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm and can be found at 70, High Street, Hailsham.

High Church Music

St. Bartholomew’s Church in Brighton, squashed in between the London Road and the railway station, is a monument to those architectural feats of the Victorian age. Built entirely of brick in a Germanic style, it is a pre-Brutalist slab that towers above those nearby temples of Mammon, Sainsbury’s and Costa Coffee. Designed by Edmund Scott, with much of the interior the work of the Arts and Crafts movement’s Henry Wilson, it was completed in 1874. Without spire or steeple, the 135-feet height to the apex of its roof gives St. Bartholomew’s claim to have the tallest body of a parish church in the country some weight. Whether this is true or not, it makes the place a bugger to heat.

There are few things in life that could persuade me to join several hundred other people on a perishing February night and sit for two hours in the nave of this church, where the temperature inside seemed no different from the zero degrees outside, but I Am Kloot are one of them. A curious choice for the sold out Sussex stopover of their short English tour, John Bramwell’s Manchester three-piece fit perfectly into this sacred setting, even if they don’t quite see it that way.

Why I Am Kloot are not better known is a puzzle. Bramwell’s gorgeous voice - a weary, reedy burr - and his nagging melodies have spun out across six studio albums since 2001. With sedentary bassist Pete Jobson and Captain Haddock lookalike drummer Andy Hargreaves providing the mainstay of their lazy, jazz-folk psychedelic sound, they only came to national attention when their fifth album, Sky at Night, was unsuccessfully nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. Augmented to a six-piece, the bulk of their set at St. Bartholomew’s is drawn from this album and their latest, Let It All In.

Seated near the front, the sound radiates up and out into the vast space but, as Bramwell notes, those at the back are probably hearing everything 18 seconds later. Bramwell is clearly discomfited by the sanctity of the venue – the band are the only ones in the place with an alcoholic drink – and continually gazes up to check that disapproval is not going to rain down on him. I Am Kloot have a celestial preoccupation: their lyrics are peppered with references to the sky and the stars – their heads are in the clouds. They open with From Your Favourite Sky, and Northern Skies is an early gem in the set. Bullets, Shoeless and Hold Back the Night (the night is another motif) feature amongst others from the new album and the set wraps up with a glorious trio of songs – Lately, Radiation and Proof – from Sky At Night.

When they return to encore with These Days Are Mine (time is also a recurring theme: "Isn't it rich? The future just keeps on coming"), Bramwell confesses that the band have struggled with the acoustics. What sounded spiritual and elegiac to the audience, was the sound of control spiralling away from the band and up into the heavens above.

Downland: part four

The village came into sharper focus: the square tower of St. Peter’s church significant above the tree line, the roof of the estate house, a spiral of smoke curling skywards from a gardener’s bonfire. Skirting the buildings of the estate farm on the edge of the village, Ridler felt some apprehension. There was little enough light for him to be indistinguishable but an unknown figure in the village, when all were at hostelry or home, would always arouse suspicion. The first time he had come off the Downs this way, a man had called after him as he passed the pub - Ridler had not stopped - and since then he had cut through the grounds of the estate rather than navigate the final part of the village.

Ridler paused at St. Peter’s. The path to the church was marked by the war memorial. In the weak light, he could still make out the names, those very English names. Backshall, Clouting, Collingham, Notley, Unstead: the fallen of the Great War. Ridler had not fallen; many times he thought he might fall but he had caught himself and had come through physically unscathed. Other names: Cornwall, Loftus from the second war. Ridler had tried to enlist for that one too but although the Consul in New York had been polite and accommodating, Ridler knew that he had not taken him seriously. He looked down the hedge-lined path to the church; he could see no light. At one time, he would have always chanced a visit but he had not been in for a year now, even though he had several times been in the porch, at the door, before turning away at the last thinking better of it. The village was warm, still and quiet; he could see an open-doored cottage across the way but nothing stirred within. Eating in the parlour perhaps; tending their own modest crop at the back after a day of toil at another’s; sleeping in a chair by a window. Ridler coveted the simple pleasures of these simple people but not the narrow confines of their narrow experiences. Those who saw some of the world through the prism of a war were not here now: they did not come back.

He turned again towards the church and headed down the path. Ignoring the door on the village-side of the squat, Norman church, Ridler passed clockwise around the northern end of the building before coming into the porch of the south door. At closer quarters, he had seen some feint light from within as he skirted the building; this did not mean there were occupants. The flickering of votive candles had been common when he had visited the deserted church before. He listened carefully at the door. He could hear nothing. He lifted the latch and eased the heavy oak door. Candles had been lit but, beginning to gutter now, the devotees had long gone.

Stronger Together

Having allocated £40m of its budget on the road to nowhere – the Bexhill/Hastings Link Road – East Sussex County Council is now gearing up to saving £60m over the next three years by cutting services used by the most vulnerable in the county. The fact that it is sitting on reserves of over £400m make the decision that they are preparing to take at the next meeting of the full Council all the more scandalous.

Under the budget proposals cooked up by the Council’s cabinet committee, children with special needs, disabled people, victims of domestic violence, older people, young people at risk, young parents and the homeless will all have services reduced or cut. If you look at the make-up of the cabinet – white, middle-class and middle-aged down to a man (and I mean that literally; no women, let alone a young person or someone from a different background) – it does go some way to explaining how a decision that requires such a lack of empathy could be made. That, and the fact that over the past two years it has been made clear from the very top: it is the same old nasty Tory party attacking the weakest targets they can find.

However, Lewes Stop the Cuts, a coalition of individuals, trade unions, charities, students and community groups, is committed to fighting these cuts to public services. A lobby of the next Council meeting is being held on Tuesday 12th February. Any individuals or organisations who can support this lobby should meet at the main entrance to County Hall, Lewes from 9am onwards to let the councillors know that those they think are the weakest are - together - the strongest.

It's Cold Outside

Now that the story of the death of Princess Diana is completely exhausted of any news mileage, some august journals have become fixated with the weather. It is strange that middle-market tabloids, dyed-in-the-wool climate change deniers, should use the extremes of weather we have experienced over recent years to make their daily bread, but they do. The endless rain and the countless flood alerts have been the subject of obsessive coverage throughout 2012 and, in the grip of winter, the potential for cold weather has got them very excited. They feel safer with the cold; their attitude seems to be: Global warming? Really? When it’s that cold outside? And now, with forecasts of snow, their shrieking has reached hysterical levels.

I used to have a similarly childish obsession with the weather – when I was a child. As a kid in London, I was familiar with the place name Herstmonceux for two reasons. First, I was slightly annoyed with it for nicking the Royal Observatory from up the road at Greenwich. Even though it happened in 1947, I felt I had somehow been deprived and that all the tourists milling about outside the building at the top of Greenwich Park were being conned. The second reason that Herstmonceux was familiar to me was because it frequently cropped up on the weather forecast; well, not so much the forecast, as the review of the day’s weather that Jack Scott or Bill Giles sometimes gave at the start of a forecast. If there had been extremes of weather – temperature, sunshine, rain, snow – very often Herstmonceux would be mentioned as having the highest or lowest of whatever was being measured. I am sure that other places were mentioned just as regularly, but an observatory thief with an unpronounceable name with the letter ‘x’ in it, stood out. In my naivety, I assumed that the Meteorological Office knew what the weather had been like across every inch of the land, and I was fascinated with the idea that Herstmonceux was the epicentre of extreme weather in southern England. I never made the connection between the observatory and weather; and so it never occurred to me that the reason it experienced more sunshine or the lowest temperature was because there was a weather station there to measure these things.

In 1990, the Royal Observatory moved again to Cambridge but gradually throughout that decade its various functions – astronomy, particle physics, hydrography – were scattered to different locations. I am not sure when the Herstmonceux weather station would have moved but it is now in West End, a minor road leading out of Herstmonceux village to Gingers Green and Stunts Green. Since ending up living in Herstmonceux, I pass it every day I go to my allotment. It is a very unassuming single-storey wooden building, protected by tasteful racing green metal security fencing as it is unmanned and automatic. Equipment there measures air temperature, atmospheric pressure, rainfall, wind speed and direction, humidity, cloud height and visibility. The station produces constant observations and transmits them to the Met Office in Exeter; the minute-by-minute readings can be accessed on the Met Office website. It is said that weather balloons are launched twice daily from the station but I have never seen one. A friend has, and sighting one myself has now become a minor obsession. The Met Office has over two hundred weather stations around the country but only a handful are still manual. It’s a shame: I think I would be quite good at looking out of the window of a wooden hut and then phoning in the news that Siberian Snow Chaos Hits Britain.

Downland: part three

Arriving at Firle Beacon, exposed to the full westerly current as it travelled across the landscape to meet the land mass, this was Ridler at his most free. Away from the cell’s dimensions of the caravan, the narrow minds of the village, the puritan judges of a world stiff with conformity, he was alive. The ochre sun, now drowned in the horizon, coloured the very top of the spiralling clouds above him. He discarded his jacket and shirt and - bare-chested, arms spread wide, head thrown back – felt the strong, warm breeze on his stigmatised skin. Below him, the panoramic vista he had grown to rely upon: the wheat-packed fields mapping away from him to the cloud-mirrored ridge of the Weald; the county town of Lewes, cradled in the creases of the surrounding hills; the tied villages, standing firmly at the centre of their feudal estates; and the Tower, that single turret of sturdy split flint that so mocked his own Englishman’s castle. The solid and unchanging landscape of tradition, of England. Ridler, himself born so English, had made himself so foreign; and now he felt connected to this pastoral idyll, this England, but not to its people. He inhaled deep and long through his nose and exhaled loudly and capaciously from his mouth until his breath became first a bellow and then a roar. A roar of affirmation, a roar of freedom, a roar of innocence: he could not be blamed for the way the Writer’s brief stay had ended. Way down in the village of Firle, had anyone looking up been able to see or hear clearly, they would have made out a variegated bestial figurehead on the bow of the Beacon, sailing away in the fading light, proclaiming the clarity of his conscience.

Replacing his jacket and shirt, Ridler draped a scarf over the top of his head and held it in place with a battered, broad-brimmed felt hat he had taken, with the scarf, from his jacket pocket. Tying the scarf under his chin, in such a way that only eyes, nose and mouth were visible, he began the climb down to Firle picking his way carefully down the gradient. He could see the car lights on the Lewes Road, fuller now but still a dull, lazy amber, and a cloud of steam as a train was leaving Glynde station. These – the road and the rail - demarked the two lines he would need to re-cross before he could feel less threatened. When he would be walking in the cool and quiet of the tree-lined lanes that led him home, he would be happy. As he descended, the stiff breeze of the Downs subsided and the flat land rose to meet him.