The Power of Place

I keep returning to Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century British Painting because it’s that kind of book – one that invites rereading. Neve’s introduction is a guide to how to read the book which is not an art history survey of schools or influences, but a reminder that landscape painting is never just scenery. It is about states of mind, about how place shapes imagination and emotion.

The Power of Place

In a chapter on Stanley Spencer called The Need for Roots, Neve asks:

Have you known the life-long power of a place? Does a place have a hold on you?… How, if you do not know this, can I convey to you the depth and poignancy of the hold that Cookham had on Stanley Spencer?

How would you answer Neve’s first question?

The Camp at Lydiard Park

My brother told me only this week of a recurring dream: he is trying to catch a bus home to Lydiard Park, where we spent part of our childhoods. That place is certainly one of the touchstones of my life. In memory I am there often –  roaming the fields alone, building dens, stung by nettles, playing “leaky” on long summer evenings with home base under the great Cedar of Lebanon on the lawn, or rattling along the concrete roadways on the go-kart my father had made for me. He painted it red and black. Johnny Brewer came to borrow it one evening and we never saw it again.

We didn’t live in the mansion although Audrey did, together with her parents who were the caretakers. We lived in one of the huts of the encampment built on adjacent fields as the 302nd U.S.Army Station Hospital to care for casualties from the 101st Airborne Division – a place made famous by the TV series Band of Brothers.

It was then used to house German prisoners of war. In the postwar housing shortage, families were rehoused there. The Wiltshire and Swindon History Center describes it thsi way;

This area, four miles from Swindon was very isolated, with little public transport and no telephone; some of the families were itinerant, some children aged up to nine arrived at the school having attended no other. (The school) seems to have served the children of people displaced by the war who may have had difficulty coming to terms with post-war Britain.

The camp huts set out in groups of six in a field. Thanks to The Lydiard Park Archives I know that our hut was designed as a 10-bay hospital ward, It was built on a Ministry of Works pattern and was 60′ long  by 18’6″ wide. These huts were prefabricated, designed for rapid mass production and easy assembly, and during wartime they – and other huts like them – sprouted across the British landscape as military bases and hospitals,  They were made economically with lightweight timber frames and plasterboard covered with bituminous felt.

By the 1950s, they were draughty, damp, and impossible to heat. When my parents’ bedroom walls ran with water, they decamped to the living room.

Step inside the door at one end of the hut and there is a bathroom with a water heater to the right and a kitchen with a stove, a sink, a green painted mangle table, and cupboards to the left. My mother used that mangle table for her computer half a century later. Doors off a corridor led to a living room with a wood-burning Tortoise stove, two bedrooms, and down to a larger bedroom across the end of the hut with a door that opened to the vegetable garden my parents planted. Wherever they lived there was always a garden.

The buses were infrequent, Micky Winter’s traveling shop came twice a week and there was no telephone on the camp. The huts were linked by concrete paths some of which were still covered for the protection of patients between surgery, treatment rooms, and wards. They made for thrilling echoing tunnels  for children to run through, especially when it was getting dark.

I only remember one car on the estate. Errol Mulraney’s father had an unreliable old car that had to be hand cranked to get the engine spluttering. The concrete roads were safe for children, for endless games of skipping and hopscotch.

We moved there when my mother was appointed to run a school for the camp children. Later, after Jimmy Patience and family moved away, my father became the groundskeeper for the estate. The big house with its lake, lawns, avenues of trees, and church was simply part of my childhood territory.

The Mansion

The great house looked over its weed-choked lake, its sweeping lawns edged by sprawling rhododendrons, the untended walled garden with its crumbling brickwork – all had the air of abandonment. The woodshed – once the camp mortuary – smelled of oil and sawdust. There, the Massey Ferguson tractor powered the circular saw, its high whine slicing felled branches into sweet-smelling logs. They were sold by the bushel with the bonus of a bundle of kindling. Chopping logs for kindling was my job. 

At the far end, a work room, with a bench and  a wood stove where men gossiped, tea brewed, cigarettes smoked, and tools were sharpened and oiled.

“When Swindon Corporation purchased Lydiard Park in 1943 they acquired a house in a state of decay which even the military had rejected. There was no running water, electricity or heating. The servants’ quarters and outbuildings, from the butler’s pantry to the brew house were relicts of a disappearing world and going up to bed with nothing but a candle to light the way was a terrifying experience for the caretaker’s young daughter.”

The house itself was dark, damp, and surely haunted, if not by spirits then by its own past – furniture shrouded, ceilings caving in, plaster falling, and rooms heavy with mildew and decay. I didn’t go there often. Mr.and Mrs Vizard were the caretakers of the house and lived in the only part of the house that was habitable.  Mrs. Vizard sometimes gave me tea and buttered toast. The Archers. was on the wireless and beyond the warmth of the kitchen was the empty house itself – dark, damp, and decaying. When – years later – I read Great Expectations I had already been to Satis House and knew where Miss Havisham lived.

In 1951, Aldous Huxley wrote:

The Playground

Yet outside was freedom: to roam at will, climb trees, pick cowslips, build dens, damn streams, and turn the estate into a private adventure ground. Each spring the gypsies returned for the bluebells in the woods. Along the ha-ha stood tall beeches with soldiers’ initials cut into the bark, and remains of old campfires. I remember snow drifting over my Wellington boots, socks soaked and feet numbed, and the outbreak of myxomatosis in the warren by the lime tree – rabbits too dopey to flee, sickening and dying.

There was lambing at Rummings’ farm, and the sickly smell of a rotting haystack, hollowed inside and full of mice.You could play all day and see no-one except perhaps the milkman who made a stop at the woodshed. For thruppence you could buy a delicious orange drink and sometimes my father treated me. Sometimes a lorry dropped off Zanko and a work crew of Poles or Serbs to help fell the trees, mend the fences, and clear the tracks. 

A Place of Dread and Daring

In the woods we braved the place of dread – the ice house hidden in the undergrowth, although I had no idea what it was or what it was called. We dared each other to get close and drop stones through the grate to hear the echo return from watery black depths below.

Johnny Brewer, with relish, warned us not to wander too far into the woods or “Mr Whizzer’ll bang you.” Mr. Vizard had a shotgun, In those days you could  earn a shilling for the tail of a grey squirrel.

The joy, the chilblains, the scrapes and bruises, the terror, and the sensory overload – all became the sort of memories Amy Clampitt once called

“the perishing residue / of pure sensation.”

Long before Lydiard Park became a public attraction, conference centre, and wedding venue, it was my private domain. And so it remains, in imagination.

I am grateful to the resources of the Lydiard Park Archive and their extraordinary labours of love in providing  the research and the resources that are invaluable for anyone interested in Lydiard Park and its history.  So many stories…