The world in a corner of England
FRANCES SPALDING is entranced by a woman’s journey through the historical landscape of West Sussex – a trail that leads to poets, art galleries and a brutal war
“I followed paths so familiar that I knew where the puddles would be.” This is Alexandra Harris admitting, midway in her journey through life, that the best path took her back to West Sussex, where she was born and grew up.
Harris’s intention in returning to her birthplace was crystal clear: not only to celebrate the beauty of what she calls “a fairly obscure part of rural England”, but also to reawaken its past. And that is exactly what she does in this delightful book, deploying a variety of sources – from local customs and habits to record books and churches – in order to bring to life a cast of known and unknown characters who occupied or visited this area over the centuries.
Certainly, William Blake deserves his chapter. It was on the Sussex coast, after all, that Blake conceived of ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’, his famous metaphor for something small but aged having witnessed much in its time. The Rising Down sees Harris attempting to do the same for this patch of southern England, excavating generations of stories from the area’s past.
Derogatory connotations used to accompany the word ‘local’. Not so today. “Local is major,” Harris insists, adding: “As we adapt to living more sustainably and resourcefully, attending to the frustrations, dilemmas and richness of what’s nearby, a great diversity of experience comes down to us from those who have been before.”
Those who visit local record offices are often disappointed by gaps and silences. Treasure can be hard to find. Harris often begins intuitively, perhaps with some initials on a house or a name that has caught her eye. But as discoveries are made, she often uses sideways thinking or is gifted with luck. Having linked one of her characters to a church, she discovers his family name in the stained-glass windows. But it is when she rolls back the aisle carpet, and goes on rolling, that she uncovers memorials to the entire family.
Such finds begin the telling of local lives but lead on to wider worlds. The brutalities of civil war are well conveyed in the chapter on Arundel. And elsewhere the focus on the building of a single house in Chichester is related to the nascent classical style then spreading though England’s regional cities. This building today houses the Pallant House Gallery. Few can name, as Harris does, the carpenters of the panelled walls on which now hangs the finest collection of modern British art outside of the Tate.
The South Downs are the background setting to many of the narratives told here. They are like a green wall rising behind the playing field of Harris’s junior school. And when she came in 11th of 12 in a running race, they stood, she recalls, “for something that was not to do with coming first or last”.
Such recollections glimmer among the great density and richness of research. “It was the untold – the mystery rather than the known thing – that took hold of me,” observes Harris of the process of writing this book. And it is the unravelling of these mysteries – the revelations of what lies within – that makes The Rising Down such a joy to read.
Frances Spalding is emeritus fellow of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge
The author brings to life a cast of known and unknown characters who occupied or visited this area over the centuries