Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

I stood in steady rain, Kentish mizzle, waiting for the exact hour that would let me into the house. Entry was staggered. Elderly gentlefolk of unimpeachable character guard each room, hallway, staircase. ‘Fresh flowers, daily newspapers and the occasional cigar’ add to the atmosphere. The Express has shrunk to a tabloid since Beaverbrook’s day and the Times has lost its status as a journal of record. Who, I wondered, had the job of smoking those Havanas — until they were suitable butts? Who provided the dark rim of spittle?

A tumbler of well-watered whisky and a comforting cigar were always within reach of the Nobel Prize-winning author (who dictated with the panache of Edgar Wallace), the compulsive painter. Books were everywhere, histories, biographies, volumes and volumes about Napoleon, the occasional novel or humble classic. I noted Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station : a first edition, I assumed, lacking jacket. Wilson’s book was published in 1940 — when the Churchills had left Chartwell (too risky, ponds visible to bombers; too close to Biggin Hill) and the house was shut up. So how authentic was this library?

‘On only one recorded occasion during the whole of Marx’s thirty years’ stay did he attempt to find regular employment,’ wrote Wilson. ‘The resistance to the idea of earning a livelihood may, at least partly, have been due to an impulse to lean over backwards in order to forestall the imputation of commercialism which was always being brought against the Jews.’ Karl Marx and his sprawling family, evicted from the ‘fashionable suburb’ of Camberwell, occupied two rooms in Dean Street, Soho. Another heritage myth. Another potential shrine. Churchill was quite effective at commerce, without getting his hands dirty: he had wealthy friends, he got top weight for his journalism and books. He played the market.

We see what we want to see: a drawing room of the kind you might come across in numerous unpretentious rectories, restored cottages, captured farmhouses. Too much furniture: fabric-covered armchairs, baggy sofas, inherited desk, mahogany card table (thought to be rather good, possibly Georgian). Chintz curtains, fading Mahal carpet. There is no nonsense about integrated design. Somewhere for everybody to sit, to sprawl; alcoves shelved, family photographs, paintings by Dad (not Dadd). Look closer. This seemingly commonplace room is hung with eighteenth-century chandeliers that gleam in a vulgar abundance of teardrops. That smudgy view of the Thames, over the desk, is by Claude Monet. A gift from Emery Rose who bought the lucrative foreign rights to Churchill’s books, after the Second World War. It’s a useful conversational piece among the dozens of loosely Impressionist daubs by the householder.

Punchdrunk with history, blinded by uniforms, medals, presentation cigar boxes in malachite and silver, groups of old folk stick and cluster. They lived it once and now they want it confirmed. In writing. In images. They are reluctant to step outside, into the garden. Which way should they turn? Towards the fish pond? Churchill, after a good lunch, would sit on his chair, dripping maggots for his beloved carp. His 1930s paintings of the pond, in reproduction, have something of late Monet: shallow water, red-gold fish shapes among the lily pads. A mood of retirement and contemplation.

The rain brings out the scent from beds of santolina, dripping lavender. Lady Churchill supervised the planting, with advice from her cousin Venetia Montagu. The terraced rose garden with its heavy-headed excesses, the sheer bulk and weight of petals, is an experience that is quite unlike the tokenism of suburban and municipal patches. Terrace to lawn. Vine-draped pergola to pavilion. A line of canvas-backed chairs, tilted against the wall, to let the rain run off. White oast houses beyond an orchard that is heavy with late fruit. Alcoves for private conversation; benches hidden by tall yew or box hedge, summer houses and rose walks.

It is shocking to admit, but here at last is the paradise garden. Water running from rocks, into ponds and pools and lakes. Fruit. Walks offering varied views of house and park. Domestic felicity (underwritten by blood, connections, power). A small paradise is achieved and, despite the ticket-buying crowds, it is present and accessible in a way that the contrived ‘views’ of Painshill, the retrievals of Enfield Chase, are not. Churchill, who saw most of his investments wiped out in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, did a Walter Scott, or Jeffrey Archer, he wrote himself (dictated, flogged his researchers) back to prosperity: a torrent of sonorous hackery, jobbing journalism and cardboard history (in sets, volumes, yards). While the garden evolved. Grew, flourished. It’s hard to imagine Lady Thatcher, banished from power, having much time for plant catalogues. Her retreat in quasi-pastoral Dulwich was very soon abandoned. The rose, for Tony Blair, is only useful as a symbol, a thornless logo.

Chartwell was well chosen. The absolute Englishness of England (soft and southern) is manifest in every photograph; a dream country of orchards that don’t have to be picked, cattle as pets, toy farms, sentimental ecology. The great man bricklaying in a velvet boilersuit, roof tiling in Homburg, gloves, cigar. An old house on the spring line, knocked about, rebuilt by Philip Tilden, to represent no particular place or period. A landscape that is unthreatening, rounded, fertile. A Kentish Arcadia: H.E. Bates’s Larkin family (for toffs). A moderately dysfunctional troop who were amateur in every sense (except that of staying afloat, raising the readies). And the certain knowledge, underwriting this bucolic charade, that Westminster was just over the hills. The car was waiting. On every M25 map, among the nine— and eighteen-hole golf courses (five of them between Godstone and Sevenoaks), is the proud red dot for Chartwell. Chartwell means that it’s time to swing north, to head for home.

If, by whatever accident, Chartwell is the paradise garden, can Churchill be seen as its painter? Now sodden, dripping, I arrive at the Studio, by way of the Golden Rose Walk. The Studio is no euphemism, tumbledown shed or Portakabin: it would be a substantial house in Islington, a terrace in Hackney. The scale of this building, the views on offer, might suit a Rodin or a Courbet. The stuffed bull’s head, provided by Manolete, and hung over the door, doesn’t mean that the old man had any truck with Picasso and Iberianism. He painted from a wooden armchair, his back to the landscape.

On either side of the A21, fixed in permanent opposition, are the emanations of Churchill and Samuel Palmer. Churchill is always photographed looking east towards Underriver and Palmer’s Golden Valley. These are non-complementary versions of the pastoral. Palmer’s innocent shepherds and cowgirls turn agricultural labour into a sacerdotal experience, woods as churches: he was always peeping, surveying, peering shortsightedly through a leafy frame. ‘The dream,’ he wrote to John Linnell, ‘of antepast and proscenium of eternity.’ Palmer, an ‘old Tory’, issued at his own expense a pamphlet denouncing the rick-burning activities of depressed Kentish labourers.

‘The English Radical and the Gallic Jacobin are brothers,’ he wrote (in An Address to the Electors of West Kent ). ‘Let us rally around once more… round the noble standard of Old Kentish loyalty.’ So declaimed the Londoner, the harvest moon sentimentalist.

Churchill was a royalist, rogue Liberal, turncoat; he paid lip-service to the established Church (no private chapels at Chartwell). But Palmer was that extraordinary thing: a fanatic for the Church of England. A fundamentalist of the middle ground. The High Weald was that ground; an extension of William Blake’s Virgil woodcuts.