“…it was only then that I saw how tenuous,
really, the hold of all these people had been on the land they worked or lived
in”.
V.S. Naipaul
(1932 – 2018), The Enigma of Arrival.
High on a hill in
Picardy stands the lonely Thiepval Memorial to the 70,000 missing Allied
soldiers who died on the Somme. At school I was captivated for life by the
literature emanating from the First World War so I later went in search of the
place.* I have twice stood there, looking up in awe at the names of the men and
women commemorated. My first sighting of the acres of British and German graves
was by chance, in 1971 on the return leg of a road trip to Italy. Northern
France in those days had no autoroutes
and the main Route Nationale took
travellers directly through the warzone. Ten years later I joined a tour of the
Somme battlefield, stood in the preserved trenches and went to Thiepval. In
2016 I was again at the Memorial for a one hundredth anniversary ceremony in
the company of a British Prime Minister and a French President. I felt like an
insignificant figure in a historic landscape, for this is a landscape still
resounding with stories of men’s courage, catastrophes and compatriots. This is
a land that has been marked forever by a previous generation’s commitment to
war.
In counterpoint to the human
induced horror experienced by the Tommies in France is the vengeance nature
unleashes on mankind. On 22nd February 2011 an earthquake wrecked a
beautiful city and rent the urban landscape of Christchurch in New Zealand.
Picking my way around the ruins four years later I felt a similar sense of
devastation that I experienced in the Somme trenches. What man can do to
obliterate a landscape, nature can do to mankind.
The landscapes of Britain
are now mostly protected by, and subservient to, the will of farmers, planners,
developers, grouse-moor shooters and walkers. There have been rare natural
disasters in recent years such as Cockermouth in 2009 and Mousehole in 1981.
Yet on other continents many people live in perpetual fear for natural
disasters. When such landscapes and people collide cataclysmically it is the former
that often comes off on top. Fires in California and Eastern Australia with floods
in the Caribbean and Bangladesh take lives and property frequently.
My interaction with
landscapes includes amusing, dramatic and wistful episodes. Confrontation with
a deadly serious East German border guard, (yet he smiled), in Cold War Berlin;
saving the life of a buddy on icy Foule Crag in Cumbria; and gaping at the gas
chambers at Auschwitz; all have left me with vivid images up to fifty years
later. For me landscapes are inspirational, humbling, historical and, on the
last hundred feet of a mountain climb, tiresome. Yet when standing on the
summit of Ben Nevis in a whiteout one recent June my sense of triumph was
matched by my wonderment of the permanence of the place.
Nonetheless, my travels
in other landscapes reveal countless examples of man’s success at controlling
his places. I ask myself, is this a good thing? In this new century we are
learning more each year of the cost of that control; put crudely that cost is called
‘commercial development’. The scale of the downside of economic expansion (its sole
purpose is to feed the billions of this planet’s inhabitants) is represented
graphically and daily on our screens. Images of Indian rivers overflowing with
plastic and the polluted oceans poisoning the fish stocks are ubiquitous. Today
I read in my newspaper of a Leatherback turtle, washed up dead on a Cornish
beach, its belly full of a plastic bag ingested in mistake for a jellyfish, and
its body scarred by swipes from a propeller blade. What we see now are
landscapes under pressure from man. In turn they are taking on more assistance
from the elements to push us back.
This blog
explores the relationship between person and place. I look at landscapes I have
visited and record my impressions on how people and the land have related to
one another. Some times they co-exist happily. Sometimes they do not. Forest fires,
earthquakes, warfare and human internment (at Port Arthur and Auschwitz) have
stamped notoriety on previously unremarkable locations. And then there is the
Lake District in England, my choicest landscape of them all. How do crowded
communities and political upheaval beset our island? I find the supplicatory
sheep are now outlawed in areas where once they provided a living for man. I
find that ‘rewilding’ is a dangerous concept, and besides, a hopeless objective
as this island is too crowded to exclude people from parts of it.
The late, great
Alfred Wainwright – council worker, fellwalker, guidebook writer and artist –
said of Blencathra, one of the mightiest mountains of England: “This is a
mountain that compels attention, even from the dull people whose eyes are not
habitually lifted to the hills”. I apply his sentiments to the entire landscape
on earth. It “compels attention” so that we learn to live better in it and pay
it more respect.
++++++++++
* My
bookshelves have long given space to the poems, plays and novels of Wilfred
Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, R.C. Sherriff, Robert Graves and later a prize winning
series The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker. These have been joined, a
century after the event, by some thoughtful and freshly interpretive accounts
of the war. Readers looking for a new perspective on events that culminated one
hundred years ago this autumn might be rewarded by the study of work by Andrew
Roberts, Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Gary Sheffield and David Stevenson, amongst
many more. The often romantic ideals surrounding the novelists and poets are
put into perspective by some of today’s writers who remind us that the British
nation as a whole supported the move of going to war in 1914.
