This Saturday's Sussex event...

The Amberley Wildbrooks

If you would like to attend this Saturday's talk, walk and sing-along in Amberley, Sussex please do e-mail the organisers at:

thehilairebellocblog@gmail.com

It promises to be a splendid day and the Amberley Wildbrooks are very beautiful at the moment. 

WHEN I am living in the Midlands 

That are sodden and unkind, 

I light my lamp in the evening: 

My work is left behind; 

And the great hills of the South Country 

Come back into my mind. 

The great hills of the South Country 

They stand along the sea; 

And it's there walking in the high woods 

That I could wish to be, 

And the men that were boys when I was a boy 

Walking along with me. 

The men that live in North England 

I saw them for a day: 

Their hearts are set upon the waste fells, 

Their skies are fast and grey; 

From their castle-walls a man may see 

The mountains far away. 

The men that live in West England 

They see the Severn strong, 

A-rolling on rough water brown 

Light aspen leaves along. 

They have the secret of the Rocks, 

And the oldest kind of song. 

But the men that live in the South Country 

Are the kindest and most wise, 

They get their laughter from the loud surf, 

And the faith in their happy eyes 

Comes surely from our Sister the Spring 

When over the sea she flies; 

The violets suddenly bloom at her feet, 

She blesses us with surprise. 

I never get between the pines 

But I smell the Sussex air; 

Nor I never come on a belt of sand 

But my home is there. 

And along the sky the line of the Downs 

So noble and so bare. 

A lost thing could I never find, 

Nor a broken thing mend: 

And I fear I shall be all alone 

When I get towards the end. 

Who will there be to comfort me 

Or who will be my friend? 

I will gather and carefully make my friends 

Of the men of the Sussex Weald; 

They watch the stars from silent folds, 

They stiffly plough the field. 

By them and the God of the South Country 

My poor soul shall be healed. 

If I ever become a rich man, 

Or if ever I grow to be old, 

I will build a house with deep thatch 

To shelter me from the cold, 

And there shall the Sussex songs be sung 

And the story of Sussex told. 

I will hold my house in the high wood 

Within a walk of the sea, 

And the men that were boys when I was a boy 

Shall sit and drink with me.

The South Country by Hilaire Belloc

They must have known we were coming...

I'm delighted to announce that The Black Horse pub has been re-opened just in time for the forthcoming Belloc Society event in Amberley. It is a fine, and old, establishment which was (and is once again) the social hub of the village.

The listed building has, interestingly enough, been bought by media mogul Paul Smith who is behind the TV show 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?'. The full story can be found here. I wish Mr Smith every success, with the venture, which seems to be motivated by a desire to make a contribution to the rural life of Sussex as much as anything else.

I'm sure that we will also have time to visit the Bridge Inn which features in the The Four Men:

"We came at last past the great chalk pit to the railway, and to the Bridge Inn which lies just on this side of the crossing of the Arun. When we had all four come into Mr. Duke’s parlour at the Bridge Inn, and ordered beer and had begun to dry ourselves at the fire, the Sailor said: ’Come, Grizzlebeard, we promised to tell the stories of our first loves when we came to Arun; and as you are much the oldest of us do you begin’".

The annual Belloc Society talk in Sussex...

Chris speaking at The George last year

I’m very pleased to announce that Chris Hare will be giving another talk at The George and Dragon, in Amberley, on March the 1^st. Chris is, amongst many other things, a local historian and folk singer. Indeed, he is at the forefront of the revival in Sussex folk music. In this respect he perpetuates the worthy musical tradition which Bob Copper inherited and passed on. 

Chris will be examining, and reading, Belloc’s Sussex poems. It is said, that Belloc was to Sussex what Wordsworth was to the Lake District. The poetic cord between the County and Belloc will be examined in some detail.

Last year a good time was had by all and I'm sure this year will be just as convivial. 

PLEASE NOTE THAT IN ORDER TO ATTEND THIS EVENT YOU MUST E MAIL:

thehilairebellocblog@gmail.com

There will also be a mini-bus departing from Clapham in London. Seats will be allocated on a first come, first serve basis. If you would like to book a seat, please e-mail be at the address listed above.

The talk will begin at 4.30 PM but it will be preceded by lunch and folk singing between 1.00 and 2.30. There will also be a bracing walk onto the downs after lunch (bring your waders!). Thereafter, we return to the pub for the talk.

The George and Dragon is a splendid old pub which dates back to the Middle Ages. We will have exclusive use of the function room.The nearest station is Amberley and although one could walk (ten minutes) the road is busy and so a taxi would be preferable (over the bridge in the opposite direction to the village):

Castle Cars: 01903 884444
Cathedral Cars: 01903 889688
MJ Cars: 01903 745414/01798 874321 (6 seater)

If you wish to have lunch at The George you must phone ( 01798831559), or e-mail, the pub to advise them of this. Otherwise you will be left feeling rather peckish: thegeorgeanddragonhoughton@hotmail.co.uk

Now for some more background on the speaker:

Chris Hare was born locally in 1962. Since 1987 Chris has been writing on local history and local interest topics. He is a graduate of the University of Brighton and has an MA from the University of Sussex. He has written nine books and some two hundred articles on historical and Sussex topics.

'The Haunted House'...

I recently asked a friend of mine to review 'The Haunted House' by Belloc (illustrated by Chesterton in a, seemingly, supreme act of kindness). What prompted me was an e-mail from an Italian who is, currently, translating the work into Italian. My friend has views on the matter and they are forcefully expressed. This small piece is an anonymous contribution, although a few of you might be able to put two and two together.


''You recently asked my opinion on Belloc's 'The Haunted House'

I'm afraid this is it. I finished the book last night. This morning I give you my unrehearsed reaction to it. Off the top of my head just as if you'd asked me in the pub...

If my first acquaintance with Belloc had been this book, and if it had been represented to me as typical of him, I would never, ever have bothered to read another one. I hated the experience. I have been bored by Belloc's novelistic pot-boilers, but NEVER so adversely affected and depressed by any as I was by this one.

It's the story of a deception practised to win back what is supposed to be an unjustly-appropriated inheritance, a country house: but as Belloc makes clear, the house in question only came into the hands of its "true" owners by means of an earlier injustice, the expropriation of monastic lands ... its "true" owner, a member of the (implicitly protestant) rural squirearchy - who thus ultimately has only in truth a flawed right to the place - has by incompetence allowed the place to get into the hands of a mere relation by marriage, a pushy, vulgar and manipulative woman (a well-known type in other novels by Belloc and GKC) who plans to make money by selling it, and ignores the possibly stronger right to possession of the son of the now-deceased owner ... Although the man is fairly decent - well, he's the best unfortunately that poor England has to offer these days, a hollowed-out sham of a traditional landowner - rather like a better-educated Emanuel Burden, honest according to his imperfect lights...

The first two-thirds of the book are entirely devoid of any action and merely lay out this scenario, introducing a gallery of grotesques designed to make us feel keenly the corruption of English political and academic life - an American and an unbelievable vulgar coster-monger (with a dreadful wife) who've bought their way into the House of Lords, plus another Lord who lectures in "psychology" at Oxford, and who is unbelievably dim and stupid and has a cruelly caricatured speech difficulty (Belloc makes too much fun of these people, going on about their habits until the whole thing becomes not just tedious but aggressively boring - and the phonetic representation of "cockney" - rather like Shaw's over-indulgence in it in 'Major Barbara' - becomes unbearable.) What's more, the Lord who lectures in "psychology" is two sorts of impostor - he doesn't know his own subject (which Belloc seems to equate with ESP or 'psychic research') AND is secretly a gossip-columnist for a cheap newspaper). There are other repulsive minor crook characters - money-lenders, newspaper owners, all (naturally) being disguised Jews who've changed their names.

There are other little digs at Kipling - not prompted by any necessity, and a suggestion that the occult writer FWH Myers was really Meyer - I mean, FWHM WAS a funny bunny, although some of his stuff is really interesting - and obviously he wasn't Belloc's cup of tea (an Italian probably wouldn't notice these points and 90% of English readers wouldn't either, BUT they seem to me to add to the general ill-humour that the book exudes).

This of course gives Belloc a ready excuse for a repetitive parading of his own well-known grouses, resentments and obsessions about money, ancestry, the stupidity of Oxford Dons, etc. He seems to have had a thing about barrow-boys which is quite noticeable elsewhere in his output - was this something brought on by the success of the music-hall star Albert Chevalier and his famous "coster" songs or had the Belloc family suffered from a "low character" in some way (well, there were some money scandals, earlier and later in life and the Oxford resentment is well-known...)?...

WHAT an Italian reader would make of all this I can't imagine. The reader is being continually button-holed and harangued as if by a convinced and obsessive conspiracy-theorist: it's tedious to one who knows a bit about the Englsih scene, and more tedious to one who's read a few other Belloc novels. I personally think that once you've encountered the Botts in Richmal Crompton's WILLIAM book you've got enough satire on parvenus to last you a lifetime - and with more variation and fun. I always prefer satire to be good-humoured: too much rancour is, I feel, self-defeating. And Belloc sneers from a position of impregnable Moral Superiority and Knowingness ALL the time: although there are stylistic genuflections ( viz, "the cat's pyjamas") to PG Wodehouse's manner he doesn't share The Master's enviably sunny disposition...

The methods used to get the house out of the hands of the man and his son are vaguely reminiscent of the con-tricks and financial wizardry flayed and displayed in 'The Mercy of Allah'.The young heir impersonates a ghost to put off the potential buyer of the house: inspired by the sparky but amoral pretty daughter of the American peer he fakes an ancestral ghost and frightens the elderly coster-monger peer into serious illness. All bets are off, the affair gets into the papers, the intruded owner is demoralised...and the cruel methods used to get the house out of the hands of the new female owner are just as cruel (and recounted with JUST the same semi-sadistic delight) as those Kipling devised for some of his horrible short stories of revenge (where casual bullying gives way to actual hard persecution such as, e.g., "The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat" and "Dayspring Mishandled"). Read them. You will see what I mean. They are clever but horrible.

The absolute dearth of pleasant or upright characters to act as touchstones of honesty reminds me of other early modernistic presentations of a grey unmoral world, Stevenson's 'The Wrecker' and Gissing's 'New Grub Street'. Incidentally, there's something to be said about Technology being the driver of 'The Wrecker' (the telephone and the speed of modern communication are a main plot-motors there) descriptions of San Francisco and even I think Hawaii centre on the miles and miles of telephone cables festooning every street...Belloc is not averse to using telephones, big cars and even cameras as important features here. If I were writing a novel, I wouldn't. I am always AMAZED by this medievalist's being able to drive a car... but not having electric light or a phone. I can't drive, and have a kind of moral horror of it. But that side of things is a hobby-horse of my own, between me and the shrinks.''...

SO the "happy ending" is brought about by deception (and presumably ANOTHER American woman becomes part of the English rural scene). WHY was Belloc apparently so touchy about that? Her style of colloquialism can NEVER have been heard from the lips of ANY genuine American lady (I think I take Scott Fitzgerald as a good realistic reporter here). And we're back to the possibility that the house REALLY belongs to the monks ...

Although I've never seen GKC' s illustrations to the story, I think I can imagine them accurately enough. I think those for 'But soft We are Observed' (which images I once studied pretty carefully) could be pasted in without too many discrepancies.

Quite honestly, I wish I'd never read the blasted book.

And IMHO, the idea that the book should be recommended to an Italian readership is as much a wrong-headed non-starter as the notion expressed to me some years ago by that rather odd slightly aggressive elderly lady (?WHO?) who was on the old Chesterton Society committee - that GKC' s novel "The Return of Don Quixote" could be adapted as a fun musical for schoolchildren - YE GODS!!!!''

Welcome to Belloconia...

Carcasonne

I have just added some links to quite a number of Belloc's essays (below the book section). It is a veritable treasure trove of Belloconia.

Belloc has something to say about most things and most of what he had to say is well worth reading. Even if you disagree with his 'Philosophy' of Life you will not be able to get around the fact that he was one of the great prose writers of the 20th Century. For that matter, he wrote so much about so many things a lucky dip into the Belloc essay pot would normally (eventually!) come up trumps with something which is, at least, mildly appetising.

So, if you are not interested in mowing a field you might well have visited Carcasonne and be pleased to be reminded of the experience. Roman Roads in Picardy may not be a travel guide priority but, perhaps, a visit to Delft might just lift the spirits:

''Nevertheless, I say that in this excellent city, though it is outside Eden, you may, when the wind is in the right quarter, receive in distant and rare appeals the scent and air of Paradise; the soul is filled.''

Wassailing in Sussex...

Wassailing refers to a traditional ceremony that involves singing and drinking the health of apple trees in the hope that they might better thrive. The purpose of wassailing is to awaken the cider apple trees and to scare away evil spirits. It is normally done during January. The South Down Folk Singers will be wassailing in Worthing this year and everyone is welcome to join them.

Old Apple tree, old apple tree;

We've come to wassail thee;

To bear and to bow apples enow;

Hats full, caps full, three bushel bags full;

Barn floors full and a little heap under the stairs.

Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!

'Kingsland' - Belloc's home 

Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!

A Catholic tale have I to tell! And a Christian song have I to sing

While all the bells in Arundel ring.

I pray good beef and I pray good beer 

This holy night of all the year, 

But I pay detestable drink for them 

That give no honour to Bethlehem.

May all good fellows that here agree 

Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me 

And may all my enemies go to hell! 

Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël! 

May all my enemies go to hell! 

Noël! Noël!


Hilaire Belloc (from the The Four Men, 1912)