Everyman's England by Victor Canning

Author:Victor Canning
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2011-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

CARAVAN ON THE

COTSWOLDS

Whether you are a nominalist or a realist I can guess what the word Broadway means to you. Broadway – girls in top hats, carrying swagger sticks and doing a jerky dance across a Ziegfeld stage; electric signs across the facades of many-storied buildings, and the blare of popular songs. If you have only been inside a cinema four times you know all about it, though you may have wondered why you should have to know all about it since it is generally so infernally dull and stupid. ‘The Broadway Melody’ was a song which, by grace of some virtue and a great deal of publicity bellowed its way into the ears of thousands of listeners and it settled the meaning of the word ‘Broadway’ for most of us.

That is America’s Broadway, or so the films would have us believe. The English Broadway is a very different place. It is a little village, nestling under the scarp of the Cotswolds, with its back to the hills and facing the broad vale of Evesham.

It has a long, wide main street, bordered by broad stretches of grass, running gently from the foot of the hills into the plain, a main street decorated by houses built of grey Cotswold stone, which is a mature yellow when it comes from the local quarries but takes that quiet, mellow grey tone as the air dries the moisture from it.

The houses are almost all beautiful and the wide grass verges that separate them from the road and the occasional trees make a setting which enhances that beauty. These houses have been built to last, built honestly and from the material at hand. Timbered cottages, the almost ecclesiastical Tudor dwellings, and the austere charm of the Georgian houses: they reflect the spirit of the master craftsman who made them and portray the ages in which they came into being. Here, in the Cotswolds, rests a village which has resisted the attacks of jerry builders with a resolution which is admirable, and it may well claim to be one of the most beautiful villages in England.

It is a glorious example of the creation of beauty from the things close at hand, grey stones that glow with a refulgence which comes from age, roofs that are covered, not by dark slates, but with thin flakes of Cotswold stone and softened by a patina of lichen and moss, and well-formed doorways that in summer are overhung by wistaria sprays that rival the spreading bounty of the yellow stone-crop and arabis.

I would not belittle the appeal of ecclesiastical architecture. One would be lethargic not to respond to the effort which has thrown up tall towers, outspanned flying buttresses and fashioned lofty naves, in order that man might have a fitting place to worship. For all that, I like domestic architecture better. The houses where people have lived, quarrelled, made love and passed through all the turbulence and joys of living stir me more than the places where they have solemnly worshipped.

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