A memory: I am sitting with my class drawing. We are not in school but outside and it’s raining. And we are using something I have never used before, called pen and ink. It’s not my usual teacher. I’m in year 5 or 6, and I have this scratchy pen and a bottle of black ink. And I am drawing bricks. Drawing and drawing, lines of bricks. Now windows. Now roof tiles. I am drawing The Rookery, the birthplace of David Copperfield in the novel by Charles Dickens, which was in a certain “Blunderstone” village, easily recognisable as Blundeston. And it was in this same tiny Suffolk village that I lived from the age of four until around twenty.
Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday is celebrated this week, reminding me of the last major Dickens celebration – the 100th anniversary of his death in 1970. Blundeston responded with a Dickensian festival which I can just remember, although I can only have been 6 years old. And I remember it mainly because of a large trampoline on the village playing field, an unheard of excitement! But also for a pageant of Dickensian characters and a real horsecoach trundling past our house. Everyone dressed up, and yes, that really is a picture of me, in 1970, as David Copperfield.
Although I didn’t read the novel when young – David Copperfield is long book and includes all sorts of “grown up” sin, such as fallen women and imprisonment – I suppose, without knowing it, a layer of awareness of the value of books and the written word was implanted that day, at the festival and through the landmarks associated with the story. I learned to appreciate the village – the Rookery, of course, The Plough pub, from where Barkis the Carrier set off for Gt. Yarmouth. And the village sign, carved in wood, depicting young David Copperfield himself, beside the church, with its famous flinted round tower, and sundial, so beautifully remembered by Copperfield:
“There is nothing half so green that I know anywhere, as the grass of that churchyard; nothing half so shady as its trees; nothing half so quiet as its tombstones. The sheep are feeding there, when I kneel up, early in the morning, in my little bed in a closet within my mother’s room, to look out at it; and I see the red light shining on the sun-dial, and think within myself, ‘Is the sun-dial glad, I wonder, that it can tell the time again?’”
My primary school was right next to that very churchyard. Whilst not exactly Dickensian, it was not a happy place; the cane and the slipper were regularly applied by the staff back in the 1960s. But at least the teachers introduced me to pen and ink. I can smell the inks now… And such colours! As well as drawing Dickensian landmarks, we also used them to create stained glass windows, on greaseproof paper, inspired by the windows in the church.
Years later I set up a dark room and photographed some of these land marks (my drawings are long lost). Between the Rookery and the church was a curious round wall – a pound for stray sheep. Inside the church it was always quiet and peaceful and I remember sitting at evensong, on a summer’s evening, listening to birds singing, the late sun lighting up the plain walls, and enjoying the tuneful repetition of hymns. I loved their stories too. Phrases like “For those in peril on the sea!” thrilled and frightened me as much as “The Lord is my Shepherd” still moves me.
My parents moved away about the time I went off to Art College. I have never been back to Blundeston, but I find I still dream of the house where I grew up, the trees I played in, the gardens, my bedroom, my den, shared with my sister Kate. The surrounding fields and quarries, the contorted hedgerows, ancient and twisted and hollow inside, were a wonderful playground and it was a landscape, full of stories for anyone with a little imagination.
This year, with Charles Dickens celebrated everywhere, Blundeston (with both good and bad memories), is calling me.
Perhaps this is the year to return to my old haunts… and put a few ghosts to bed.
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