Chartwell was well chosen. The absolute Englishness of England (soft and southern) is manifest in every photograph; a dream country of orchards that don’t have to be picked, cattle as pets, toy farms, sentimental ecology. The great man bricklaying in a velvet boilersuit, roof tiling in Homburg, gloves, cigar. An old house on the spring line, knocked about, rebuilt by Philip Tilden, to represent no particular place or period. A landscape that is unthreatening, rounded, fertile. A Kentish Arcadia: H.E. Bates’s Larkin family (for toffs). A moderately dysfunctional troop who were amateur in every sense (except that of staying afloat, raising the readies). And the certain knowledge, underwriting this bucolic charade, that Westminster was just over the hills. The car was waiting. On every M25 map, among the nine— and eighteen-hole golf courses (five of them between Godstone and Sevenoaks), is the proud red dot for Chartwell. Chartwell means that it’s time to swing north, to head for home.
If, by whatever accident, Chartwell is the paradise garden, can Churchill be seen as its painter? Now sodden, dripping, I arrive at the Studio, by way of the Golden Rose Walk. The Studio is no euphemism, tumbledown shed or Portakabin: it would be a substantial house in Islington, a terrace in Hackney. The scale of this building, the views on offer, might suit a Rodin or a Courbet. The stuffed bull’s head, provided by Manolete, and hung over the door, doesn’t mean that the old man had any truck with Picasso and Iberianism. He painted from a wooden armchair, his back to the landscape.
On either side of the A21, fixed in permanent opposition, are the emanations of Churchill and Samuel Palmer. Churchill is always photographed looking east towards Underriver and Palmer’s Golden Valley. These are non-complementary versions of the pastoral. Palmer’s innocent shepherds and cowgirls turn agricultural labour into a sacerdotal experience, woods as churches: he was always peeping, surveying, peering shortsightedly through a leafy frame. ‘The dream,’ he wrote to John Linnell, ‘of antepast and proscenium of eternity.’ Palmer, an ‘old Tory’, issued at his own expense a pamphlet denouncing the rick-burning activities of depressed Kentish labourers.
‘The English Radical and the Gallic Jacobin are brothers,’ he wrote (in An Address to the Electors of West Kent). ‘Let us rally around once more… round the noble standard of Old Kentish loyalty.’ So declaimed the Londoner, the harvest moon sentimentalist.
Churchill was a royalist, rogue Liberal, turncoat; he paid lip-service to the established Church (no private chapels at Chartwell). But Palmer was that extraordinary thing: a fanatic for the Church of England. A fundamentalist of the middle ground. The High Weald was that ground; an extension of William Blake’s Virgil woodcuts.
The walls of Churchill’s studio are hung with his back catalogue, crammed like the Royal Academy Summer Show — in the days when Palmer found his paintings perched a few inches from the ceiling. The lakes and springs and orchards of Chartwell, by Churchill’s mediation, do not become sites of vision. His canvases are resolutely occasional, holiday memories, overworked postcards from the Med; grace and favour villas and yachts. A Cook’s Tour of hobbyism: Marrakech, Venice, Monte Carlo, Jamaica. The Surf Club at Miami. Hot colour generously applied. Lashings of Sickert gravy. There is no attempt to work, by series or season, towards an understanding of this Kentish landscape; no fixation, no obsessive return, under different conditions of light, to the garden and the surrounding countryside.
Churchill didn’t look, he sat. He passed the time. The trick of painting, begun ‘by accident’ (as his daughter Mary Soames explains), ‘took the role of a therapy, distracting him from the traumatic debacle of the 1915 Dardanelles campaign’. No such therapy was available to those unfortunates who were there, in the hell of it. The endless views strung around the Chartwell estate become a gloss on dark history; florid rehabilitation, a strategy for elective amnesia. The paintings are never about the situation the painter is confronting, they confirm the position in which he set his stooclass="underline" lakes and arbours and beaches. A few palm trees, a distant snow-covered range of mountains.
Churchill took up this practice, as a relief from deep depression, while staying in a rented farmhouse, near Godalming. A tame expert was wheeled in for complimentary advice: society portraitist Sir John Lavery. Then came Sickert, the friend of Degas, frequenter of music halls, murder obsessive: master of varnished darkness, half-drunk pints, the urban condition (boredom). Sickert, not ashamed to use a newspaper photograph as the basis for a composition, taught Churchill to project slides on to canvas, to bypass line-drawing.
If brought to it, if forced, Churchill could be ‘paintatious’ (his word) about Chartwell. The Weald, under snow, as seen from the drawing-room window. The Honorary Academician Extraordinary, exhibiting under the pseudonym of ‘David Winter’, had no trouble in being accepted for the summer show. Samuel Palmer sweated on rejection. The Golden Valley of Underriver was his invention, he affected it; the way future generations have come to see it. He imagined — and therefore established — a secret paradise; accessible in a period of innocence, then lost. The Palmer industry is rudimentary, a few walkers, an art school. The only book on Palmer stocked by Tate Britain was not displayed on the shelves, had to be searched out when I requested it. There was a late flurry of interest in Palmer when his works were faked by Tom Keating, the tricks of vision easily duplicated.
Churchill’s Painting as a Pastime remains in print, along with postcard reproductions, videos, mugs, coasters, key rings. This much-visited, much-admired National Trust property is the ultimate point for the tourist who wants to leave London without leaving London; the paradox of an open asylum in which the demons of history can be drugged with scents, bright colours and a prostituted landscape.
5
After Westerham, we cross the young Darent, and then the M25; heading north. The six-lane section of motorway (naked central reservation, modestly planted soft estate) is balm to our spirits. In the distance, to the east, the road is beginning to curve, anticipating our journey up the Darent Valley. For once the speeding transients are playing it by the book, observing the correct distances between vehicles. There are no jousting heavy-goods lorries travelling in packs. Our river/road is sublimely democratic: it has endured Surrey and Kent, counties that prefer to pretend it’s not there, and it is heading home. Of course, an orbital motorway can’t have a home, but it can have memory, a starting point: Junction la with its toll booths, its sense of being a frontier post. The crossing of the Thames at Dartford. Multiple-choice highways. Essex or the coast. Canterbury, Greenwich. The Bluewater retail pit.
In my mythology, the M25 is born of the Thames: conceived at Runnymede (by Staines), dying at Dartford. In bloody twilight. Echoes of Eliot: ‘Burning burning burning burning.’ Misbegotten in an up river canoe. Expiring in oil slicks. Grey to grey: the immense skies of the Thames Estuary. Liquid to light: an Aegyptian temple beneath Runnymede Bridge (with its golden bars, its smoky shadows). Out of these mysteries comes a metalled ribbon of consciousness, that saga of simultaneity: a tidal motorway carrying the psychic freight of all the landmass it contains.