By Gregory Day
PLACE
The Rising Down
Alexandra Harris
Allen & Unwin, $49.99
The acclaimed English cultural historian Alexandra Harris admits that as a bookish child growing up around Pulborough in West Sussex, she spent a large part of her childhood trying to imagine herself back into the high drama of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries, the English civil war, and the Restoration, made constant havoc in her home landscape, as it did in the rest of the country.
Fog rolling in over the South Downs in West Sussex. Alexandra Harris’ latest book is a love song to her home county.Credit: Getty Images
Such historical ruptures can seem purely entertaining for a young child but the focus on the violent upheavals of those centuries in the early part of Harris’ new book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape, sets the tone for a work that understands the dynamic nature of even the oldest cultural traditions, just as it celebrates their survival and continuity.
Refreshingly, and perhaps also impossibly for someone whose previous books on English writers and artists, Romantic Moderns and Weatherland, betrayed decidedly belletristic interests, Harris states early that she wants to “reach back behind Romanticism, asking what regional places might look like, feel like, if art and literature paid them little notice”.
She pays special interest then to the work of local historians in the Sussex field, pointing out as she does so that whereas until recently “local” meant “minor”, now in the 21st century, with our urgent need to reground ourselves on a damaged planet, “local is major”.
This sensibility governs Harris’ love song to her home county, a passionate yet meticulously researched rendition indebted to people who have been excluded from more abstract or generalist surveys. One memorable example of her approach is the key focus she devotes to William Barttelot, the water bailiff of the River Arun in the 1630s, whose job it was to watch over each and every customary, economic and natural aspect of the river with an understanding that “the history of a place was in the wicker steeples lowered into the water as much as towers pointing to the sky”.
A distinguishing strength of Harris’ book is the way it blends personal memory with investigations of the historical record. Harris threads her narrative with a homage to the life-work of Elizabeth Garrett, the remarkable mother of a childhood friend, who also taught Harris history at school. As it turns out, Elizabeth Garrett’s real vocation was not so much the drama of the Russian revolution she taught in the classroom but the living archive of the local cultural landscape in which she taught it.
When she is ailing and no longer able to read, it is Harris who becomes the beneficiary of many rare Sussex documents from her old teacher’s private library. Hyperlocal titles such as The Arun Navigation, Dew Ponds, and a local contemplative text called The Roadmender, become essential grist to Harris’ chorographic mill.
Unsurprisingly, though, given the focus of Harris’ previous books, a select band of painters and poets are enlisted to help build the sense of local cultural strata so critical to her portrait. Some of these, such as John Constable and William Blake, are well known to us still, but many are almost entirely forgotten.
For instance, in the 1700s, at the heart of the age of Empire, when a careless lack of regard for local culture prevailed in the centres of artistic as well as political power, the talented Smith brothers of Chichester stayed steadfastly at home, working in studios in the Downs, from where they painted the local scene. It’s a nice touch, and a moving one, when Harris plots the country route George Smith took on occasional visits to London to exhibit his work. “By horse or on the stagecoach, which left from Dolphin Inn opposite the cathedral. St Roche’s Hill, dipping into the valley by Singleton and West Dean, Midhurst, Lurgashall, through the weald, over the border to Surrey and into the Strand.”
Alexandra Harris writes about William Barttelot, the water bailiff of the River Arun in the 1630s, who understood that “the history of a place was in the wicker steeples lowered into the water as much as towers pointing to the sky”.Credit: Getty Images
It must be said, though, that this is no cute history fetishising “local colour”. In keeping with her emphasis on the layers hidden beneath appearances, Harris is careful to detail the intrinsic relationship of colonialism and slavery to the class-riven communities of the Downs and the Weald. We also follow Sussex emigrants to Canada and Australia when rural poverty becomes a desperate problem in the 1800s.
Then, as industrialisation and modern warfare excoriate the land, Harris documents the radical changes brought to the area. During World War II, for instance, the whole south-east of England was prepared as a battleground, it being the obvious landing point for an enemy invasion. When Harris tells us that 750,000 Canadian soldiers were moved into the area through 1941 alone, neither the social implications nor the historical irony of the moment escapes her. “A century after labourers left the area for Canada, unable to survive at home, Canadians had arrived to defend it.”
The mechanical suddenness and scale of the war notwithstanding, this, like the historical upheavals that had so captured Harris as a child, was but one more formative event in a landscape in which human culture, like its rivers, its animals, soils and seas, had always been in motion. The generative nature of every such local life-world, bound as it is into the deeply specific character of its landscape, lies at the heart of Harris’ brilliant portraiture of place here. It underscores her view of her home county in the 21st century as “a place made of other places, as all our places are”.
Gregory Day’s The Bell of the World has been shortlisted for this year’s Miles Franklin Literary Award.
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