LEAVES & PAPERS: October 2020

A Canterbury Tale, made in 1943 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, is a strange film. Centred on an off-beat mystery plot, it is at once a realistic portrayal of British life at the end of World War II and a form of myth-making that was doubtless intended, consciously or otherwise, to encourage social solidarity in the ongoing conflict. After a brief preamble based on the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a dramatic cut from a shot of a falcon in flight to a Spitfire in the sky above modern Kent introduces the story and the three main characters - a young ‘Land girl’, an English soldier, and an American GI. They meet by chance at a blacked-out railway station, one stop away from their destination, and as they walk towards town in the darkness a man dashes out from the shadows, pours glue into the woman’s hair, and disappears. It is later revealed that the ‘glue man’ had already assaulted several other young women in the same way. Some time later, after discovering the culprit, they travel on to Canterbury, where they each experience a blessing.

No one gets killed, hurt, or arrested, and the overall mood is gently melancholic, albeit slightly surreal. Beautifully photographed in Kent, Michael Powell’s home county, the film’s affirmation of traditional ‘Englishness’ - with an emphasis on tolerance and eccentricity - can come across as impossibly quaint and even reactionary, but a recent article nonetheless suggests that it is possibly ‘the most loving and tender film about England ever made’. The description is not as hyperbolic as it may sound. The three ‘pilgrims’ are weary and tired because the world is in upheaval and their future unknown, but when they arrive in Canterbury their lives take a turn for the better. As Xan Brooks puts it in his piece in The Guardian, the film tells us that ‘the only world is the one we're in, bashed about and bent out of shape, and the only heroes the people around us: frail and fearful, sometimes misguided, and coping as best they can. But if we can learn to trust them, and invite them to trust us back, then we may just be OK’. This, he suggests, is the Canterbury blessing.

I watched A Canterbury Tale on an evening just before the summer solstice, and a few days later a friend sent me an image of the Wittenham Clumps, a pair of wooded chalk hills in South Oxfordshire, that had been painted by Paul Nash in the year the film was made. It depicts a solstice, when both the sun and the moon are prominent in the sky. Nash, drawn to the English countryside in its more mythical aspects, was particularly attracted to places such as Silbury Hill, the Avebury stone circle, and to the Wittenham Clumps, which he once described as ‘haunted by old gods, long forgotten’. Reflecting the influence of Romantic artists such as William Blake and Samuel Palmer, he was fascinated by the mystery and magic of the perpetual cycles of nature. Another war artist, Evelyn Dunbar, who painted everyday scenes of women’s life in England during the 1940s, sometimes saw the world in a similar way, especially after she settled in Kent, where she became deeply attached to its countryside. While her characteristic style of painting was straightforwardly sensitive, it was occasionally infused with visionary intensity. On easels in the studio after her death in 1960 were the masterly Autumn and the Poet, on which she had worked intermittently for over a decade, and the unfinished Jacob’s Dream, which depicts a modern incarnation of the Biblical character lying in a field at night. Above him is the dream - a ladder extending to the heavens, bearing angels, shown in the painting as abstract white shapes. On either side of the ladder are wooded hills, strongly reminiscent of the Kent countryside where she had made her home.

As I think about it now, Evelyn Dunbar’s painting reminds me of the ‘stairway to heaven’ scene in A Matter of Life and Death, another peculiar and memorable film by Powell and Pressburger, in which the story begins with an RAF pilot waking up on a beach on the southern English coast after his aircraft has crashed. In turn, that association brings to mind Crowlink, the last song on Heart’s Ease, the recent album by Shirley Collins, which celebrates her favourite place near the South Downs, where she can ‘sit and gaze at the sea and think about what’s gone and what is to come’. A moody and evocative piece of music, founded on the drone of a hurdy-gurdy and harmonium, and embracing recitation, birdsong and sounds of the sea, it is thought of by Collins as ‘a step out of the past and into the future’, but it has also been described in a review as ‘a pagan epiphany, or an emanation of the spirit of Albion’.

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LEAVES & PAPERS

Thursday, October 22, 2020

SPIRITS OF ALBION

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