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August 11, 2005

Would I were in Grantchester - In Grantchester!

Yesterday we took a leisurely walk along the river to Grantchester. We stopped half way to munch upon a Mediterranean feast of falafel and hummous pitta bread, olives and stuffed vine leaves, oh and crisps, plenty of crisps. It wasn’t until after Littleone had fed most of her packet to the swans and ducks that I began to wonder if birds can be affected by an excessive salt intake. (Can anyone put my mind to rest on this one?) I even made friends with a bull but unlike Sylvia Plath on a similar walk I didn’t feel the urge to recite Chaucer to him.

‘We began mooing at a pasture of cows, and they all looked up, and as if hypnotised, began to follow us in a crowd of about twenty across the pasture to a wooden stile, staring fascinated. I stood on the stile and, in a resonant voice, recited all I know of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for about twenty minutes. I never had such an intelligent fascinated audience.’

Mr PE spent the day test driving his new (in the secondhand sense of the word) camera, so depending on how they turn out I may or may not be posting some photos of our outing.
When we reached Grantchester Mr PE played with the child in the garden of the Green Man while I explored the Rupert Brooke Museum. It is just one small room but there is practically an abridged biography to read on the walls along with plenty of photos and artefacts. I particularly enjoyed seeing the programmes from some of the plays he performed at university and (of course) the letter from Virginia Woolf. For all you sport enthusiasts there was even a cup he won at something or another, perhaps cricket or something equally dull like rugby.
We didn’t have time to take tea in the Orchard this time, although we have done before. The booklet I picked up claims

‘a genteel setting where more famous people have taken tea than anywhere else in the world’

The page-long list printed in the booklet boasts of everyone from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Mike Read.
Walking down to the meadows again and then back along the river (in the rain!) I could relate as to why after so many travels abroad Brooke still kept retuning to Grantchester and what must have been going through his mind when he wrote;

would I were

In Grantchester, in Grantchester!--

Some, it may be, can get in touch

With Nature there, or Earth, or such.

And clever modern men have seen

A Faun a-peeping through the green,

And felt the Classics were not dead,

To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,

Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .

But these are things I do not know.

I only know that you may lie

Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,

And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,

Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,

Until the centuries blend and blur

In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .

from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester(Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

All quotes taken from a leaflet The History of The Orchard Grantchester. There is a website but it seems to be down at the moment.

Posted by purple elephant at August 11, 2005 10:27 AM