Yesterday we set off on a long journey along the coast to the tip of the peninsula where we live.
The road was a succession of hairpin bends winding past big empty beaches and bays, and among hills and streams and fields with sheep, a spectacular drive.
At the end of this odyssey was a tiny settlement of between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty villagers.
The village consisted of a grocery store which also sold petrol, a farm shop, with delectable homemade jams and pickles as well as a wide assortment of meats, sausages, pickled and preserved goodies, and which served coffee on a terrace.
We came away with a jar of my favourite quince jelly. There was a Himalayan centre – of all places – selling wonderful hippie artifacts, and a fire station and a village hall.
There was also a smaller War Memorial Hall, commemorating the thirty men from this place who fought in the First World war, and the four who remained on the battlefield, and the twenty-three men who travelled across the world to the Second World War, one of whom also did not return.
How the departure of these contingents of brave men who crossed the oceans to fight for peace must have affected the farms and homes in this remote place is hard to imagine. Most of the men were gone for four and six years… who was left to fix the fences, milk the cows, shear the sheep, dig the potatoes, stop up a leaking roof, or father the children?
It wasn’t just the men who went to war and came home traumatised who were the heroes.
The War Memorial Hall was our destination. It’s a wooden building with wonderful acoustics, we had come to listen to an accomplished musician play the six Bach Suites for Solo Cello. We sat there for four hours, an audience of nearly thirty, silent and awed by the glory of the throbbing and thrilling notes, the vibrating chords and soaring ecstasies of Bach’s glorious music, composed over three hundred years ago.
The musician, who performs around the world, had come to live here recently, and gave this gift to his little community, and they responded with deep appreciation.
As we drove away, still glorying in the harmonies and trajectories of soaring sound, I thought about the unexpectedness of such high art in such remote human settlements.
In the next small town with two thousand inhabitants, there is a concert in two weeks being held at a famous potter’s gallery. Milton’s Paradise Lost will be recited accompanied by a trumpet, and then a baroque concert will be performed. I expect there will be a full house.
In the remote fishing village where I previously lived was a retired ballet dancer.
She’d won a scholarship to the famed New York City ballet as a seven year old, and now in retirement she had created her own modern dance company, aided by an Arts Council grant. Her pupils performed the ballets she’d envisioned in the village hall, and it was always packed with enthusiastic supporters. They seemed to think it mattered.
“Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one”, wrote Stella Adler, actress and drama teacher. It also gives the soul the courage to reach the depths and find the strength and power to live life at the depth of our being.
I felt the truth of these words one day when I received an emotional blow so devastating, that the room turned black as I read the letter. Later, packing to go home in my bedroom, I saw the rose I’d picked on my dressing table, and as I gazed at it, feeling deeply its beauty and living energy, it gave me the hope and the courage to feel that somehow life could go on
(I was all of twenty -two !).
When resistance worker in war-time France, Odette Churchill, was asked how she kept her secrets under torture from the Gestapo, she said they sat her on a chair in front of a window. She could see green trees billowing in the sunshine and as her torturers ripped her fingernails out, she concentrated on the trees and their life and beauty.
And later when she was being returned to her underground cellar in solitary confinement, the skeleton of a leaf blew in the door with her. She seized it, and its beauty and the promise of life sustained her. Even after she was burned with a red hot poker, she was able to hold on to her sanity and integrity.
The rest of us are never tested to such a horrendous degree, but art and beauty can sustain even lives of hardship or drudgery.
The Scottish philosopher Henry Drummond wrote:
“Ask the working-man’s wife, and she will tell you there is a moral effect even in a clean table-cloth.”
And in my experience, even a handsome tray laid with a crisp tray cloth and pretty cup and saucer lifts the spirit.
So off to put the kettle on, fill the milk jug, and spoon the lapsang souchong into the pot. Music, art and beauty and a good cup of tea are an unbeatable recipe for a good life to me!
Food for Threadbare Gourmets
Back from the concert, I had little appetite for cooking supper. Luckily I had some cold chicken in the fridge, and some cooked rice in the deep freeze. Remembering Coronation chicken devised by Constance Spry and others for Queen Elizabeth’s crowning, I did a quick simplified version. The chopped chicken was mixed into mayonnaise, golden syrup, curry powder and cream to taste. The rice was defrosted in the microwave, and a handful of almonds toasted as in the previous blog. Couldn’t be bothered with the peas and sultanas in the classic recipe, just stirred vinaigrette dressing through the rice, sprinkled the almonds through and piled the chicken mixture on top. Quick and easy…
Food for Thought
Don’t cry for me, for I go where music was born. J.S.Bach on his deathbed
