Peter Jon Fowler

Painter

A watery video

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This is my first attempt to put a little video on my web page. The video itself was assembled automatically by the computer: it has just strung several watery images together and garnished them with some rythymic ‘music’.

Let’s see if it works. The scenes, all in Suffolk bar one, are respectively of the upper Alde estuary down river from Snape Maltings, Aldeburgh beach and sea defences towards the Martello tower to the south, two exhibits in an exhibition on Cley beach, north Norfolk, and looking north up Stony Ditch which divides the marshes from the shingle on Orford Ness.

Eyke

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No, I have not just sat down on a drawing pin.

‘Eyke’ is the name of a village through which I often drive. The word is genuine: it is a real-life word meaning ‘oak tree’ in Old Scandinavian. But nobody seems to live there. I never see anyone standing up there or walking along the village street: the place is apparently lifeless. It had a shop until last year, a shop so dark that I don’t know what it sold; but that suddenly closed as if there were no customers.

Perhaps the inhabitants have all been driven away by plague or even killed by traffic not obeying its electronic 30 mph sign; but as with most deserted settlements it is unlikely that one explanation alone conveys the truth. Indeed, perhaps it is not a deserted village at all in that it has never been occupied i.e. it was built but people never moved in so it has always been empty.

Curious.

 

PS Of course it was bound to happen. The first time I drove through Eyke a few days after writing the above, I saw a man standing at the bus stop. He was somewhat portly, in his fifties and dressed all in black.

Thinking about this sighting afterwards, I began to have doubts. I did not see him move: he was just standing there, static. Could he possibly have been just a dummy, put there perhaps by someone who had read my controversial note about Eyke? Furthermore, I doubted whether Eyke still had a bus service, so my suspicions increased.

All was clarified on my return journey three hours later. By pure chance, as I approached Eyke I had to join a line of traffic which had accumulated behind a dark red double-decker bus. It was a 65, the service which runs between Ipswich and Aldeburgh; I did not know that it ran through Eyke. It pulled into the roadside outside the boarded-up shop and stopped – and guess who got off! Yes, it was the man dressed in black; so he was not a dummy.

But that the man dressed in black waited at the Eyke bus-stop and then dismounted from a 65 bus there on the other side of the road three hours later does not prove that he is an Eyke resident. I need much stronger evidence than that to undermine my contention that Eyke is empty.

A Visit to Orford Ness

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Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast is a 10-mile long spit of shingle divided from the land by the River Alde at Aldeburgh and the River Ore at Orford. It ends to the south at Shingle Street, but its ‘end’ at the mouth of the Ore is constantly changing as pebbles from the north continue to be deposited there. Shingle Street is in fact a continuation of the same deposition.

The Ness is both a National Nature Reserve, for its geomorphological and botanical interests, and a property of the National Trust, essentially for its historical interest in that it was the site of military experiments and developments from the first World War until the end of the Cold War. I had the privilege of being involved in its acquisition by the NT c1990, not the most obvious of potential Trust properties since it had no endowment, was certainly not beautiful and at first sight appeared to be nothing more than a derelict military establishment. Yet for better or worse significant aspects of the history of 20th century warfare, from research on airborne bombing to the development of radar and the atom bomb, are represented in the archaeology of this place and, some 30 years after its acquisition,  few would now question its appropriateness as a Trust property conserved in the national interest. The best book about it is Most Secret. The Hidden History of Orford Ness by Paddy Heazell.

Managing the site is difficult. It usually floods in winter; there is still a danger of unexploded ordnance off the cleared tracks and paths; public exploration of the Ness is further limited by its widespread use by ground-nesting birds; and existing structures are fragile and often unsafe. Access is by ferry from Orford quay which, like so much else in our Covid world nowadays, has to be booked in advance. A key agent in the site’s management is a flock of c150 native and rare breed sheep whose carefully manipulated grazing helps keep the vegetation under control. One of my great pleasures in geriatric life is being a volunteer helping to look after this flock, but I have never worked with them on the Ness. My role is to keep an eye on them when they come off the Ness to spend the winter on the mainland while the Ness floods.

I took a party of 23 over the other day on what proved to be in terms of weather a stunning, no-cloud-in-the-sky early autumn day. The light was brilliant and, out of season, we had the place to ourselves. We coincided with a classy art exhibition which allowed us to visit buildings normally out of bounds. I will write more on this, with illustrations, later.

Are they real, these sheep?

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Meetings with curious sheep, all serendipidous and unplanned; but were they really sheep?

These two sheep were browsing under woodland up the Tarset valley in north west Northumberland, almost in Scotland. They clearly showed the effects of the local weather but whether they were wethers is unknown.

Not all that far away we encountered a lovely-looking flock of 6-month-old lambs in valley pasture. It was a bit disconcerting to see a double-headed lamb half looking at us, as it were, but it did not appear to be in any discomfort. Perhaps it will grow up to be twice as brainy as a normal sheep.

 

 

And back to Suffolk for another ovine looking at us, this time downwards; but definitely not a real sheep. I know this edges perilously near to religious devotees who see the Blessed Virgin in a soup bowl and Jesus in some spilt milk but surely it is not my imagination alone which can see a large sheep’s head, probably of a White-faced Woodland,, looking domineeringly down from out of the clouds: the ears, the furrowed brow, two eyes, a noble nose and, in the distance, lips merging with the darker clouds. The image had disintegrated a minute later but what does it Mean? Did it indeed ever exist? Is, one has to ponder, God a sheep?

Did the Vikings play cricket?

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‘Did the Vikings play cricket?’ is not a question that is often asked; but it is worth considering. We believe that merely in asking the question we may well be opening up a new field of scientific enquiry which has the potential to keep many sociological think-tanks busy for years to come. On the face of it, cricket-playing Vikings seem unlikely, but so did the possibility when I was a schoolboy of India beating England at cricket. Today we lost not just by 150-odd runs in the England v India Lord’s Test match but did so in an utterly humiliating way after we had victory within our grasp. Why has this happened? Are the Vikings to blame? Could the laws of cricket be written in runic? – we need to know.

A cricket match taking place at Lords, the home of cricket with a name derived from Viking ‘swords’. The man with the wooden object in the air is batting with a bat, a skeuomorph for a Viking sword or phallus; but in the absence of a ball the white-clothed figures have taken up significant positions and postures around the wicket for the next stage of the ceremony. The man with splayed legs off the wicket on the extreme left is paradoxically at mid-wicket; the man with arms akimbo, or in ‘tea-pot stance’, nearest the camera is at slip; to his right is gully, a reminder of the rough terrain on which Viking cricket developed. The abundance of white everywhere clearly points to some sort of purification ritual in progress. Viking influence is also suggested by the surrogate long-ship sailing the seas of Sky high above the pilgrims. The fertility undertones of the whole scene are encapsulated by the function of the special ground out of sight behind the stands, called ‘the Nursery’. 

 

The Vikings probably first played something akin to cricket on the beaches where they pulled up their long-ships to trade and relax; they could use their swords to swipe at pebbles and skulls tossed to them. When they missed, they were sometimes hit in a delicate part of the male anatomy, giving rise to to the painful condition still known today as ‘hurtigruten.’ Through simple letter-loss, that sword scenario is recalled to this day by the name of the self-styled home of cricket, Lords. Other words also hint at past games: the terms ‘long leg’ and ‘slips’, for example, may be survivors from this Early Phase (EP), and another specialist word, ‘wicket’, plausibly derives from Anglo-Saxon ‘wic’, the actual 8th century word for such beaches.  Cultural anthropologists argue that primitive survivals of such early games can be seen in ‘beach’ or ‘French’ cricket played by, for example, familial groups and in backward places like parts of France. Indeed, the French national game of boules may well be a variant of early cricket as played by Vikings who settled in what became Normandy, flirting in its name as it does with one of the basics of the traditional English game, ‘to bowl’.

As they developed the game, Vikings had difficulty finding suitable places with a large enough area of level ground on which to lay out a properly-prepared wicket; so they headed towards monasteries where they knew they could find a nice flat bit of grass surrounded by the cloisters. Of course, that did not leave room for much of an outfield but perhaps they played a sort of reverse Hundred cricket in which the object was to keep the ball inside the cloisters, not hit it outside into the crowd. Such a setting was regulated by the Danelaw. It had the additional advantage that spectators could be charged for entry – hence the term ‘Danegeld’ – and slain at stumps without the bother of having to chase them. This is almost certainly how the tradition began of having a bier after the match.

All of which implies of course that Vikings had cricket balls; yet, though there is a hint of such existing in the name of the god Ba’al (see below), not a single Viking ball is archaeologically attested. This has led one interpreter to suggest that, not understanding cricket at all, they went through the motions of playing without a ball as a sort of ceremonial ritual – a sort of Tai Chi in horned helmets. This would accord with the very large cricket bats, wrongly interpreted as oars, found in several boat burials; such shaped lengths of wood would certainly have been too long and heavy to use gracefully in a cover drive but they can be seen as ritual bats forever missing a phantom ball (rather like English batsmen today). Hence the bowler’s dictum: ‘You miss, I hit.’

And what did this existential sphere hit? – nothing less than the Holy Grail of EP cricket, the wicket. This use of the same word for both the flat ground on which bowling takes place and the target at which the bowler aims is unfortunate, an ambiguity resulting from a slipped chisel, or ‘chiselo’, when a mason was typing to express the laws of cricket by chipping a series of short, runic lines along the edge of a megalith at Gamla, Uppsala, a Viking religious centre. Given the already complicated laws, such mistakes made the arrival of vampires to supervise ‘cricket ceremonies’ inevitable; but the basic nature of their function was maintained by robing them in white and allowing them to wave their arms about in an early form of Norse Code. Yet, as the Vikings became less hairy and more cuddlesome, the ‘priests’ of their religious practices became less blood-thirsty and morphed into ‘umpires’, heralding the start of Phase 2, or the ‘Umperial Era’ (UE). The game spread as it followed the long-ships trading up the rivers of much of the known world. Cricket’s reputation for fair players – most Vikings were of course blonde – helped in the establishment of colonies which, collectively, became the Viking Umpire based on tenets of ‘spin’ (‘you can’t believe a word they say’), lbw (‘land before wic’) and cunningly-conceived ‘declarations’ (‘this was yours; now it’s mine – you’re out’). This led to the invention of maps so that the Viking bits could be painted red.

When the masonic accident with the chipped Gamla stone it was lying horizontally, supported by two upright stones, as if it were a prehistoric dolmen; perhaps it was, for it was called ‘the Baal stone’, a name reflecting ancient eastern Mediterranean roots in Viking paganism, best translated into English as ‘balls’, later ‘bails’. The whole structure was called, in an attempt to translate from the runic into English, ‘stumps’, an Anglo-Saxon alternative to ‘wicket’; though strictly-speaking a wicket then consisted of two uprights, called the ‘stumps’, capped by the bails linking their tops. ‘Stumps’ were called when play for the day ended. Nowadays, there are three stumps, upright sticks stuck into the ground, indicating the shift over the centuries from a paganism rooted in Baalesian fertility towards a supposedly more benevolent Christianity; for of course the three sticks represent the shaft and two arms of a cross. When cricketers today talk of ‘sacrificing’ their wicket to help the team, they are not only unconsciously voicing echoes from the dim and bloody origins of their sport in the pagan temples of the Viking north but also sensing, however slightly, the even greater sacrifice made for Planet Earth by the great Umpire in the Sky.

There is clearly much more research to be done e.g. we do not know whether the Vikings had a heavy roller. The answer to the question posed by this pioneer note, ‘Did Vikings play cricket?’, is nevertheless provisionally ‘yes’. Equally clearly, there is much more to this than just a game; issues of feminism, for example, arise around the concept of ‘caught’ in a multi-gender sport. Can the single, raised and erect umperial forefinger indicating ‘out’ continue as appropriate code in an age of increasing sexual sensitivities? Was this a problem for the Vikings? An interdisciplinary, international, community project will shortly be conceptualized to research such matters under the title ‘Vikwicric’ (VWC).

Sight and sound beside the Suffolk sea

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As Covid 19 restriction are, unwisely in my view, lifted, it is nevertheless good to be able to get around in the car again. Actually, that is not true in the sense that throughout the 16 months of the lockdown, I have felt no inhibitions at all about poddling around locally in my decrepid Golf and have not once been stopped by officialdom. Failing its MOT was much more of an arrest. Now that traffic is back to pre-covid levels, already the middle months of 2020 take on a nostalgic air of the time when the roads were empty and the driving was good.

Anyway, we drove down the coast to Shingle Street, a huge expanse of shingle with an interesting history in fact and some tall stories from a legendary past. It used to be virtually deserted and a pleasure to be there; it’s still the latter but in summer the place has to be shared with hundreds of day-trippers who have parked their cars higgledy-piggledy along the Street. We stayed in one of the coastguard houses in winter a few years ago: magical. One particular stretch of the shingle used to be a fruitful place to search for material with an artistic potential, particularly pieces of wave-worn wood from boats, jetties and the like; now there is nothing.

     Some of my mini-sculptures made five and more years ago entirely from bits and pieces as found along the Suffolk coast in the good old days of beach-collecting, not beach-cleaning

It is clear from the miserable collection I made on my recent visit to Shingle street that other artists have been there too, taking the best bits of wood, brick, concrete and wood. But far more damaging from the artistic point of view are the activities of the well-meaning beach-cleaning gangs, volunteers sent out by local goody-goody organisations to clear our beaches of all the rubbish on them. But one man’s rubbish is an artist’s inspiration. It is quite clear where these gangs have been hoovering up the artistic potential, for there is no plastic; conversely, when you find plastic objects, you know the area is worth searching.

 

A beautifully clean stretch of shingle, a credit to the beach-cleaners but a desert to artists.

Three Martello towers dot the sea-wall. 

 

I wonder whether it might be possible to persuade the authorities that, just as stretches of the beach are reserved for ground-nesting birds or nudist bathing, there should be a new designation of uncleared beaches for deserving artists.