Review

The Landmark Trust Handbook

The Landmark Trust The freedom to live in the past by visiting some of the many stately homes in the British Isles is something many of us will have experienced until this year of social distancing; and who, when looking out of the window of the house they are visiting, has not imagined what it would be like to actually live in such a building and to look out at a beautiful view from that extraordinary place? Well, now you can.

In 1965 philanthropist John Smith, and his wife Christian, founded the Landmark Trust. Together they aimed to try and prevent the loss of mainly smaller historic buildings which neither the National Trust nor the Ministry of Works could envisage taking on. John Smith was already a leading figure in the conservation world: a committed enthusiast for buildings and other historical structures. His experience led him to conclude that “a body was required to tackle cases too desperate, troublesome or unfashionable for anyone else”. Today the Landmark Trust’s portfolio of ‘Landmark’ buildings numbers almost 200 in England, Scotland and Wales, with a handful of additional properties in Belgium, Italy, France, and America.

The Landmark Trust Handbook is a 250 page book in A4 format, attractively laid out, listing all the buildings in great detail with extensive description, maps, drawings and sumptuous full colour images of each. The properties are suitable for singles, couples or larger family or other groupings. The book’s opening pages are accounts of all aspects of work undertaken and stays enjoyed, including

The Pigsty near Robin Hood’s Bay, North Yorkshire. A wooden building that was once a functioning home for pigs

Ferryman’s Cottage Saddell, Kintyre, Argyll and Bute. Once the property of the ferryman, whose job it was to offload provisions from the coastal steamer or ‘puffer’

The House of Correction, Folkingham, Lincolnshire. The grand entrance is all that survives of a House of Correction once intended for minor offenders. Appleton Water Tower, Sandringham, Norfolk. Victorian water tower on the edge of the Sandringham Estate

Beamsley Hospital, Near Skipton, North Yorkshire. A circular almshouse with seven rooms encircling a chapel. A home for 16th-century ladies.

The Egyptian House Cornwell, Penzance, Cornwall. Built in the style of Egyptian Revival architecture in the early 19th century

an account from a young ‘Landmarker’ – as guests and visitors are called. Also detailed are various programmes like ‘50 for Free’ which allows any charity to nominate recipients for a free stay funded by generous donors.

From its earliest days the Landmark Trust has taken a distinctive approach to its buildings. Rather than imposing modernity upon them, it works to bring out the historic character of a place, as polish might reveal the grain. From the initial selection criteria of possible buildings, to the precise detail in their fittings and finishes, they draw out the beauty of historic structures rather than simply make them convenient for modern convenience. There are, for example, no clocks, televisions or internet connections.

Once the Landmark Trust has taken on a building, extensive repairs are normally necessary. In actioning these repairs it seeks to use the best craftspeople and traditional skills and materials to ensure the new work is of comparable quality to the old. During my short stays over the years I have found that a large part of the delight in staying at one of its properties is the character and quirkiness of the old buildings, as most of the Landmarks have unconventional domestic arrangements and with rooms in quite unexpected, yet fun, places.

Some of the many places I have stayed are very isolated and a wheelbarrow is left for you to transport your bags and food to the accommodation. At other properties Waitrose will deliver. Turning the pages of this handbook as you relax in your armchair, you will find an extraordinary eclectic mixture of buildings. Here are little timber framed cottages in wooded coombes; a large mansion where Johnson and Boswell discussed the politics of the day in the library after their Hebridean tour; a Piggery or a Ferryman’s House; a House of Correction, or a very small house on Lundy Island off the Devon coastline – all are there to be explored, with your dog, which is welcome at many of the properties. Some properties are only 30 miles from Melbourn, yet they are a world away in the atmosphere and peace they generate.

The Landmark Trust charity is not about turning back the clock. Instead all involved believe in the power of fine historic buildings to make a difference in people’s lives, both now and in the future. These are precious and finite resources maintained by a charity rated by Which as the best Self Catering Company with which to book. Staying in one of its historic buildings can transform a state of mind, providing inspiration, respite and invigoration. Simply to listen to the silence of the place you have chosen to stay in can be a very powerful memory to take away. Catherine Pritchard

Little Hands Nursery School The Moor, Melbourn

Little Hands is a Private Nursery School specialising in quality preschool education for the under fives and offers

• High staff to child ratio • Individual child centred planning & learning • Flexible booking system during term time for the 08.30am – 4.30pm nursery day • Optional holiday clubs available • Dedicated baby room for children under two We accept nursery funding giving 30 hours per week of free funded nursery for all 3 and 4 year olds and eligible 2 year olds

For further information contact : Sharon Tutty : nursery manager 01763 260964 lh-melbourn@btconnect.com

Little Hands is also at Bourn, Linton and Newton visit the website at www.littlehands.co.uk

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Raymond Chandler I stepped out of the shower and onto the bathroom scales the other morning, looked down between my feet and said to myself: “Hugh, this lockdown comfort eating stops right now! And another thing – for goodness sake stop talking to yourself out loud!” I resolved there and then to start taking my own advice. Later that day, having skipped lunch, I ate a one course simple salad for supper. After supper, in silence and with lips tightly sealed (to be sure to be sure), I thought to myself: “Try lockdown comfort reading instead of lockdown comfort eating – and choose a ‘Classic’ novel.”

So it was that I lifted down this rather old and wellthumbed-over-the-decades favourite. First published in 1940 and older than either you or I – depending on you and at a stretch possibly even older than both of us together – this book is Raymond Chandler at his finest. Settling in beside the fire for the evening and opening a 1988 Penguin reprint edition, I read again in the book’s Introduction: “Dilys Powell called his writing a ‘peculiar mixture of harshness, sensuality, high polish and backstreet poetry’ and Elizabeth Bowen described him as ‘a craftsman so brilliant, he has an imagination so wholly original, that no consideration of modern American literature ought … to exclude him.” Then the judgement of Anthony Burgess: “Chandler is a serious writer, an original stylist, creator of a character, Philip Marlowe, as immortal as Sherlock Holmes.” My welllaid plans for the evening were then thrown off-kilter. Forgetting immediately all my own advice to myself that morning I said in a loud firm voice: “Hugh, lockdown comfort reading such as this clearly requires a pot of coffee and a large portion of rich chocolate cake – so let’s get serious here!”

Raymond Chandler is one of the greatest writers of detective fiction. He introduced a new type of crime novel which he focussed on the dark underbelly of public and private life in California’s Los Angeles and then explored its daily confrontation by his ‘immortal’ creation: the tough, hard-bitten, deeply moral but flawed Private Investigator Philip Marlowe. This work, only his second published novel, consolidated the international success of his first novel The Big Sleep and showcases all Chandler’s great talents.

In the novel Chandler, in a sentence or two, creates personality and character to present a portrait that is vivid and real to the reader. Physical description, whether indoors or outdoors, is similarly drawn, time and time

again with great ease and simplicity. In the same way atmosphere is deftly created such that the interest of the reader is immediately captured and a tingling suspense is built and sustained. And all of it brought together in a way that permits the attractive, perfectly rounded, deeply sympathetic, and wonderfully human Private Investigator Philip Marlowe to shine like the star he is, travelling widely across the criminal firmament that Chandler has created. And all the while simultaneously meeting the overall reader requirement of a novel standing in the crime genre: that it be ‘unputdownable’.

Farewell, My Lovely explores familiar Chandler themes: murder; drugs; wealth; poverty; racism; corrupt police officers and, of course, their corrupt locally elected masters. Also, driving relentlessly in the background, in the foreground, and entangled everywhere throughout the novel is his central theme, which he recognises as unquantifiable and, perhaps, always beyond adequate description: that which is at the heart of all human existence, namely, the love one person has for another. In particular, the demands it makes of them, and the never-ending search for it that is our all-consuming common fate represented here by the perfectly realised main characters Molloy and Velma. It opens with Molloy committing a murder and continues on through the seamy undergrowth of big city Los Angeles, realistically depicting its lowlife and underlife while shining a light on crime, grime, poverty, murder, kidnapping, corruption including the highly visible illegal drugs and gambling operations that even today, many decades later, still guarantee huge financial profits for criminal organisations and their associated arms-length facilitators and protectors.

Gems of wonder and delight – a phrase, a sentence, an entire paragraph – are scattered throughout the book with often a mixed handful spread across a single page. Sample some here all in the words of Private Investigator Philip Marlowe:

A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet. (p40);

We went down three steps to the main part of the living room. The carpet almost tickled my ankles. (p46);

The big foreign car drove itself, but I held the wheel for the sake of appearances. (p54)

I left her laughing. The sound was like a hen having hiccups. (p100);

Her hair was of the gold of old paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much. (p109);

A smell of ironing came from the back of the house. She shut the door in between as carefully as if it was made of short pie crust. (p177).

And if the magazine’s benevolent Editor will indulge each of us – savour the beauty and the menace of the

Raymond Chandler following which on page 126 still shines and glitters after eighty years:

The car was a dark blue seven passenger sedan, a Packard of the latest model, custom built. It was the kind of car you wore your rope pearls in. It was parked by a fire hydrant and a dark foreign-looking chauffeur with a face of carved wood was behind the wheel. The interior was upholstered in quilted grey chenille. The Indian put me in the back. Sitting there alone I felt like a high-class corpse, laid out by an undertaker with a lot of good taste.

The Indian got in beside the chauffeur and the car turned in the middle of the block and a cop across the street said: “‘Hey’, weakly, as if he didn’t mean it, and then bent down quickly to tie his shoe.” (p126)

Any novel by Raymond Chandler can be recommended. This novel is as deeply satisfying as being in front of a roaring fire, having seen the autumn evening shadows start to slip across the window, while sitting comfortably enjoying a large black coffee and a double serving of rich chocolate cake. For me, reading it again brought the added bonus of experiencing that exquisitely guilty pleasure that comes from having broken very good intentions that were self-imposed earlier in a rare (very rare?) moment of weakness.

It is, perhaps, necessary to add that Chandler’s work depicts American society and the times in which he lived. So the entire range of matters and issues which are today unacceptable to many – as well as some that are today illegal – stand revealed and unadorned throughout. In particular, the casual and structural racism prevalent in everyday American life and discourse at that time shocks – including, in the opening pages, the depiction of racial segregation, which for so long was a pillar of the American way of life. Reading this novel today is useful to understanding those historical forces which in our own time secured the Presidency of the United States for its present incumbent Donald Trump, as well as the development of the phenomenon ‘Black Lives Matter’ and all that that re-emergence represents. Yet another reason to read or re-read ‘Farewell, My Lovely’ on an Autumn evening or at any other time. Hugh Pollock

We arrived in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia in 1970, with a 2-year-old and a new born baby, with all the baggage that entails.

I could only carry a couple of books, and they didn’t last long. Bookshops in Indonesia at that time carried books mostly written in Dutch, as Indonesia had been a Dutch colony and all educated people at that time spoke the language. So, I was reduced to reading the English books sold in the bookshop of the hotel. Not a very edifying selection.

I bought a novel, which was an account of the future, when everyone lived in a ‘cell’ using hi-tech, had everything delivered and saw no one. I thought it was nonsense until lockdown hit us this year, and technology was sufficiently advanced to enable a similar situation to develop.

I threw the book away and had forgotten the name of the author. However, I am told that the book in question was likely to be ‘The Machine Stops’, by EM Forster.

In Forster’s story, humanity has isolated itself, living in permanent lockdown. They live in prefabricated homes and only interact with one another by computer.

“Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a readingdesk – that is all the furniture.”

The people had come to rely totally on the ‘The Machine’, an Alexa-like global computer catering to their every whim.

“There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the button that produced literature. And there are, of course, the buttons by which she communicated with their friends.”

They sent messages by ‘pneumatic post’ – (email or WhatsApp to us today), and they would chat online via a ‘video interface’ (we call it Skype or Zoom).

“It was time to deliver her lecture on Australian music. The clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned (and touching strangers was forbidden). Seated in her armchair she spoke, while they in their armchairs heard her.”

The book was written over a hundred years ago, yet its storyline is clearly comparable to today’s world, especially with the imposed restrictions we are experiencing during the current Covid situation. We also live in a society that selfishly often values individual’s comforts over the collective good. We interact by computer and do our The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story first published in the Oxford and Cambridge Review in November 1909. It was republished in 1928 in Forster’s The Eternal Moment and Other Stories.

The story is set in a world where humanity lives underground and relies on a giant machine to provide their needs, using technologies such as instant messaging and the Internet. It describes a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Each individual lives in their small pods below ground and all bodily and spiritual needs are met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is permitted, but is unpopular and rarely necessary. Communication is made via a video conferencing machine with which people conduct their only activity: the sharing of ideas and what passes for knowledge.

The two main characters a mother and her son, live on opposite sides of the world. The mother is content with her way of life, which, she spends producing and constantly discussing second-hand ‘ideas’. Her son, however, is a rebel. He persuades his mother to visit him (and the resultant unwelcome personal interaction). He tells her of his dissatisfaction with the sanitised, mechanical world they live in. He tells her he has visited the surface of the Earth without permission, and that he saw other humans living outside the world of the Machine. However, when the Machine finds out, the son is threatened with ‘Homelessness’ – expulsion from the underground environment and death.

I recently read an account of the Spanish flu of 1918 called ‘Pale Rider’ by Laura Spinney, written in 2017, which describes how the flu epidemic changed the world.

No doubt the changes caused by Covid-19 will impact on our lives for many years to come. Ann Dekkers & Peter Simmonett