BIOGRAPHY - A SKETCH OF A LIFE

BIOGRAPHY - A SKETCH OF A LIFE

  

Sussex & Kent (1)

I was born in Worthing, at Charnwood House, a white-stuccoed double-fronted villa, now converted into flats and called Charnwood Court.

 

  Charnwood Court

 

 

It stands in Farncombe Road, a stone’s throw from the sea. My father was in Worthing after joining the West Sussex Police in the Thirties; he was desperate to escape from the poor prospects offered by a Kentish village where most of his male forebears had been farm labourers, including my grandfather.

 

   Me at the age of seven

 

Weekend visits to my grandparents’ timber-frame cottage, Brook Cottage in Church Road, Sevenoaks Weald, nevertheless filled me, even at the age of four, with a nostalgic love of an indefinable rural England that was on its last legs. Only the old men in the village knew how to scythe a lawn; only the old men knew how to lay a hedge. I used to listen as the cracked and muted church bell sounded the quarter-hours from the hill above the cottage, as distinctive, characterful and rooted in the place as the song of the blackbird in the fir-tree. I used to run my hands over the worn and time-smoothed timbers of the cottage, shrapnel-spattered, pea-green-painted, and magically recycled from Nelson’s fleet when it was broken up at Chatham. My grandparents had a pair of sentimental colour prints on the wall, one each side of the sideboard: Wellington’s First Encounter with the French and Nelson’s First Farewell. It was a house stranded in the early nineteenth century.

 

The windmill on the green where my great-grandfather had worked in the 1880s and 1890s had long since been demolished, leaving only its name on the pub – still there - The Windmill. The village would soon reinvent itself as a dormitory settlement for commuters. My paternal grandfather, christened Charles Frank but for some reason universally known as ‘Old Rodney’, with his trousers tied below the knees with string wurlers, was the verger. An old man expertly wielding a scythe to produce a bowling green finish on the churchyard grass seemed extraordinary in the 1950s, attracting the interest of journalists, and he marked the very end of a tradition reaching back centuries. I expect most of the rural skills inherited by his generation have vanished, and not from his village alone.

 

Sevenoaks Weald was where both my parents were born in 1914 and where they were brought up, Dennis at Brook Cottage and Gwen at the Weald bakery; her father was Walter Dennett the village baker. They were together from their first day at the village school at the age of four and inseparable from then on – in spite of Gwen’s mother’s strenuous efforts to break the relationship up.

 

  My parents

 

   My mother

 

 

A grammar school education in Chichester gave me tantalizing, over-optimistic glimpses of an adult life filled with leisure and culture - a nostalgia for the future, this time; the teachers who made the biggest impression on me seemed convinced that robots and computers would soon be doing all the work, freeing us all, Young Rodney included, for cultural pursuits. Thus encouraged, I developed a taste for literature, beginning with Wordsworth and Keats, painting, beginning with Constable and Turner, and music, beginning, not with the English pastoral school as you might expect (that would come a little later), but with Beethoven and Wagner.

 

The House of Special Purpose, now abandoned, soon to be demolished

 

Partly because I was very short-sighted, I was never much interested in spectator sports and not at all in team games; I was an utterly hopeless batsman because I couldn’t see the ball coming. I just heard a whistling sound closely followed by the clatter of bails and stumps scattering. I became pretty good at table tennis and snooker, where short-sightedness didn’t matter and the balls were easier to see, but at school these accomplishments were not regarded as at all worthwhile, probably – with hindsight - because they carried no risk of injury. Before long I was trying my hand at writing, painting and composing – activities the school seemed to regard as puzzling if not suspicious. It was painting that saved me, though I think I had reached the age of 16 before my Art teacher, Mr Harries, realised from the very blurred distances in my landscape paintings that I needed glasses. He understood that I was painting what I saw, or rather didn’t see. Thank you, Mr Harries. I got some glasses and they changed my life. It turned out that on the blackboards in the classrooms there were words and numbers scratched by the masters, I was able to start learning things in lessons like the other boys, and out of school friends might be recognized on the other side of the street. It was a rite of passage. A dawn.

 

But, Mr Harries’ rare interest and concern apart, school was a grim, negative and oppressive experience. I well remember the despairing trudge up Spencer Street in Bognor to catch the train to school, spirit dulled, eyes cast down, my boyhood neighbour the playwright-to-be Howard Brenton, gruff, uncommunicative and probably also despairing, at my side. 

 

  Howard Brenton

 

I became seriously ill and spent what at the time seemed like years but was more likely weeks in hospital at Aldingbourne, on its last legs as a sanatorium and now, just like the house where I was born, divided into flats.

 

 

Another House of Special Purpose – my room was top left

 

No nostalgia for that place either. In those days, children were spoken to on a need-to-know basis only; nobody thought to tell me I would get better - perhaps they thought I wouldn’t and that that was something I didn’t need to know. Who knows? But it was an isolation hospital in every sense. When I eventually recovered, perhaps against expectations, my attitudes had changed. I emerged from hospital to learn that another boy in the same class had also gone away but he had not returned; he had died of leukaemia. Life was not to be taken for granted, then. I would make sure I wasted none of whatever I had left. I have worked like a thing possessed ever since, not expecting to live to a great age. 

 

Oxford - university

My inspirational tutor at university, Jim Houston, seemed surprised that I stuck with Geography. We got on well and he thought I was a good student, but he expected me to defect to Music, and said so. Some of my friends meanwhile thought I should be reading English. The trouble was that I found everything interesting. I couldn’t choose. It was nevertheless at least becoming clear that I would teach.

 

I used to visit my remarkable Junior School headmaster, Mr Morgan. He was a volatile Welshman, perhaps more unpredictable and shorter-fused than most in his profession, but a terrific enthusiast. In an after-school session one day he gave me some arcane tests, which I vaguely remember involving the pronunciation and definition of long words. I remember that ‘miscellaneous’ was one of them. On the strength of these tests he announced to the parents of a friend of mine, wildly, and treacherously (I felt at the tender age of nine), that I was ‘a flipping genius’.  This announcement served only to isolate me from such friends as I had, the twin brothers Peter and Ronald Iden among them. Peter and Ronnie went off to the local Secondary Modern; I don’t think I ever saw them again. The 11-plus was a Great Divide.

 

Mr Morgan’s singing lessons were memorable. He was short enough to be able to stand at the piano, while giving it a good pounding, singing and hectoring us at the same time. On his feet already, he was well placed to hurtle across the room and cuff us when we misbehaved. Returning to watch him at work, from the other side, as it were, was a revelation. I realized then how much he cared about his work and about children and came to like him very much. I went back again and again. That relationship between teacher and class, fizzing with creativity, was what I (then) thought I wanted. 

 

Oxford was a jewel - timeless, glitteringly attractive and extremely tough. I felt outclassed academically, and rightly so, from my very first tutorial, which I shared with Tony Champion (later Professor of Geography at Newcastle, now retired and still a much-valued friend).

 

  Jim Houston         Tony Champion

 

In week two, Tony read out an essay he had written on Columbus which I knew I could neither equal nor adequately evaluate when called on to do so by our charismatic, benign and ever-smiling tutor. What did you think of that, Castleden? Well, er. . .

 

That first tutorial was a daunting experience, like many that followed. But Oxford did set me unreachably high standards of accuracy and argument that I might not have achieved but can still go on aspiring to, and it did equip me with an invaluable battery of research techniques that I don’t think I could have got anywhere else.

 

That’s me, on the left, as Jack-in-Green very early on May Morning in 1968, leading the University Morris Men, whirling rather than dancing through the streets of Oxford.

 

Could this alter ego be what led me later to the Long Man and the Cerne Giant? With hindsight, connections appear that were not apparent at the time.

 

Northamptonshire - teaching

After a teacher training year split between Oxford and Kettering Grammar School, teaching began in earnest in Wellingborough. The salary was so low (£900 a year before tax) that all I could afford was the rent on a very damp farm cottage out at Knuston, an all-but-abandoned plague village. In the field in front of my cottage were the green bumps of medieval house footings - houses emptied by the Black Death 600 years before. It was an unpropitious beginning.

 

 Wellingborough High School for Girls

 

In the first term, Vivienne Riches, the Head of English at Wellingborough High School, roped me in to write incidental music for her school play, Twelfth Night. I learnt a great deal then and subsequently from writing to strict specifications, to a tight deadline, and accommodating the strengths and weaknesses of individual performers. It occurs to me as I write this that all the music I have written, apart from my student symphony, has been written to commission, or at least on request - even in those early days. It explains why there is so little.

 

The Seventies were divided uneasily, restlessly and rather unsatisfactorily among teaching, socializing, composing, geographical research on the Nene floodplain, and looking for a subject for a book. Would it be a novel, a non-fiction piece, an exploration of some myth or mystery theme? My great friend the historian John Clarke out of the blue suggested giants, which seemed a bit barmy, even after an evening’s drinking, but I would in fact, much later, write three books about giants. The future seemed very blurred, like those boyhood landscapes and my paintings of them. Without realizing it, I was developing a battery of research skills and a body of knowledge and ideas about other places, other people, other times. Nothing visible was being achieved, but something would come of it later, or so I see it now. At the time, I felt frantically busy and exhausted but also directionless and frustrated, and the desperate lack of money was an ever-present preoccupation.

              

  Martin Booth

 

Friends and colleagues were important to me in these years - Martin Booth, then a poet and later to become a novelist was one. Les Berry, club singer, wit, raconteur and confidence booster, was another; he seemed to think I was worth something, which was tremendously encouraging. And a year or two later I got to know John Urmson, historian, cool and impartial observer and great listener, and his wife Trudy, who was full of fire and enthusiasm. I owe them a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Me thinking

 

 

 

 

Sussex (2)

Returning to Sussex in 1980 was another Great Divide.

 

It was a different Sussex: the Eastern not the Western Downs. Lewes, Newhaven and Brighton, not Bognor and Chichester. The research on the River Nene was completed, and with it a Master of Science degree to add to my Master of Arts, but there seemed no possibility of developing any of my Midland-generated research ideas in Sussex. They were a dead end. So, what to do next?

 

   The Long Man

 

The switch to prehistory happened at a particular moment. I was sitting on Windover Hill - a very special place to me then, now and always - with a friend, English teacher Margaret Hunt, and we were speculating light-heartedly about the origins of the Long Man when I said, as I have often said subsequently, ‘There’s a book in this.’ We were sitting on the Long Man’s head at the time, and it was as if the idea had come by osmosis from the mind of the Giant himself.

 

  Newgrange in the 1960s

 

But the path to this Pauline conversion had been prepared long before. In the Sixties I had been lucky enough to be shown round the Newgrange passage grave by its excavator, Michael O’Kelly.

 

In the Seventies, I had been profoundly impressed by the megalithic tombs and circles I saw when walking in Orkney with my oldest friend Robin Ruffell (later Professor of Economics at Stirling), and I had come face to face with the neolithic in what I instantly recognized as a ‘tree-felling’ layer that I discovered in the floor of a gravel pit in the Nene valley at Ecton – a chaotic acre of blackened fallen trees. If only I had photographed it! It was only several years later that I realised I had had a privileged and perhaps unique glimpse of a five-thousand-year-old scene of woodland clearance.

 

   Me at Knossos in 1989

 

The surge of writing in the Eighties and Nineties took me by surprise. It was as if all the uncertainties, hardships, frictions and turbulences I had gone through had powered me with a massive charge of energy.

 

Me undertaking a resistivity survey of the Cerne Giant in 1992

 

What am I trying to do? A difficult question for anyone to answer, but I had a go at summing it up in a piece I was asked to contribute to a reference book called Contemporary Authors in 1993, and it may do for now;

 

‘I want to stimulate readers into thinking in longer time scales, “deep time” as some call it, and in a more radical, assumption-questioning way than is customary. Politicians deal in the apportioning of resources on a very short-term basis, five or twenty years, but we need to be more radical and look much further forward, and much further backward, in time, if we are to find lasting solutions to the problems of man-land, or indeed man-man, relationships. . .

 

Retrieving the thought-worlds of prehistoric cultures is as essential as saving animal and plant species from extinction; we need as large a gene stock of spiritual, social, economic and intellectual techniques as we can retrieve if we are to redeem or replace our present civilization successfully. I believe the past offers keys to the future.’

                           

 

   

Me receiving a British Archaeological Award from

Magnus Magnusson in 1996