I feel reluctant to be writing this final instalment because
it is the last day of the festival. I will have to find other things to write
now, with the memory of what I achieved here to spur me on. Dartington’s ghost –
of which I am certain there are several, including in my room – will linger
with me still. And indeed, ghosts seems to be a running theme, in a way, of my
three talks today, starting with Julie Summers’ The Secret Life of Britain’s Country Houses 1939-45. In this, she
talked us through the history of several of Britain’s notable rural residences which
were converted for the service of the war. There was the 13th
century Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, which was transformed into a maternity
hospital with such beautiful Japanese wallpaper, the mothers thought they had
died and gone to heaven when they awoke! Waddesden Manor owned by the de
Rothchilds in Buckinghamshire which became a children’s home of great
splendour, despite many of the furnishings being stripped out, where the
children could roam freely, both inside and out. Aldenham Park in Shropshire,
the former residence of Lord Acton, became a rather leaky and potentially
haunted school with only one toilet, much like Audley End, Essex which became
the headquarters for the Polish section of the Special Operations Executive,
with 200 rooms and just a single loo! Others still bear the scars of their
military past with unexploded munitions unearthed in their grounds or, in the
case of Melford Hall in Suffolk, the need for extensive reconstruction. As the
ancestral seat of the Parker Baronets, when the hall was given over for use by
the army, much of the furniture was relocated to the excluded North Wing. This
part was, through blatant disregard, subsequently burnt down during its
occupation by the Royal Berkshire Regiment in 1942. All of this was delivered
by Summers in a way which seemed to evoke the ghosts of the past, as well as a
sense of desire to walk these historical halls ourselves.
Stepping further back in time, however, was Fiona Sampson
and her talk on Mary Shelley (quite a popular topic given the importance of the
date – 200 years almost to the day since Frankenstein
was conceived). For Sampson, whose book In
Search of Mary Shelley is a biography of the young author, there was the
question of whether she had the right to be poking around in her private life,
yet as Sampson remarked, Mary was involved in the biography business herself. With
this brief act of permission dispensed with, she launched into colourful scenes
of Mary’s birth on the night of August 1797, the rebellious symbolism of her
remarkable tartan dress, and the events which spawned her famous novel. These
began in the final days of her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 as
they passed by Frankenstein Castle while on a river boat on the Rhine. This, as
Sampson continued, most likely stuck with Mary until the fateful night two
years later when she and Percy, Lord Byron and John Polidori were reading ‘ghost
stories’ or ‘schauerroman’ (shudder novels) and decided to write their own (we
remember what became of this). In the process of detailing Mary’s life, Sampson
often quoted from the various journals of those concerned, especially Mary’s,
reading them in a manner which almost felt like Mary herself were present (see,
another ghost!) Why the young author is only best known for Frankenstein, however, is because she
was female and carrying her mother’s name – something the Brontës,
writing in the same era, had less trouble with given their use of pseudonyms.
Having indulged in Frankenstein on the big screen with Mel
Brooks and Gene Wilder’s hilarious Young
Frankenstein (may Wilder rest in peace, he was a handsomely zany
masterpiece), I hurried back over to the Great Hall for the final event of the
festival: the Magical Tales and Political
Poetry of Ben Okri. Although a little late for his introduction, Okri soon
launched into the amazing process of ‘living with art’ (initially that of
Rosemary Clunie for his book The Magic
Lamp), and then living inside the
art, before growing a beard and emerging with the text – the poetry – fully formed.
This meant he also had something to say about the appreciation of art,
suggesting that you ‘give every painting at least twenty minutes’ until you begin
to see beyond the surface. And indeed, the poetry he produced in response to
Clunie’s work was deeply profound, giving each a unique backstory as colourful
as the art itself. So colourful, it seemed, that a robin decided to pay us a
temporary visit, in through one small window and (somehow) neatly out the other
side. As Okri remarked, ‘When a poet reads, birds listen’ which I couldn’t
agree with more. This led on to more political poetry, gathered in his
anthology Rise Like Lions, which
addressed politics in its widest sense as ‘our relation to reality’, not just all
‘Trump this’ and ‘Brexit that’. Managing to include a small amount of audience
participation, two split-gender choirs were assembled to read poetry by Maya
Angelou and Bob Dylan, which helped accentuate the effectiveness and perfection
achieved by reading poetry aloud. After all, poetry began its life as an oral
not a written art. To continue the theme of ‘strange phenomena’, as Okri called
it, his battery began to die. The battery on his microphone that is – though he
played along in good humour, springing back to life when a new battery was
fitted. And then, seemingly unprompted, a lamp shade fell from the wall. But
these couldn’t detract from the inspirational effect he was having on the room,
and the philosophy he was dealing in to help distinguish the writer as someone
who writes every day, who makes it a bad habit, who writes ‘junk’ yet continues
to ‘burn [their] hand into [their] art’. For Okri there is no blank page
because each piece of paper has within it a ‘subterranean text’. This seemed to
me a fitting end to the festival because Okri truly does have a way with words.
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