A FURTHER WORSHIP .......

 

As befits a great cathedral city, Canterbury is of course associated with a number of writers of whom Geoffrey Chaucer is the most immediately obvious.    Admittedly I found him mostly incomprehensible until in the mid 1990s a friendly English Literature teacher engaged in revealing the joys of The Canterbury Tales to a group of 8-10year-olds (who appeared not to be having the problems with the writer that I had) showed me how to crack the Middle English code.   Once accomplished I realised that it’s relatively easy to become addicted to the works of someone born as long ago as the fourteenth century.    

The poet Patience Agbabi who lives in Gravesend with her family cites Chaucer as a major influence on her own work so clearly he was never quite as impenetrable to her as he was to me ensuring she became addicted long before I did.

Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury and attended the King’s School, going from there to Cambridge on a scholarship.  Strangely little is known about his life although he is reputed to have been a spy and he was killed in a tavern brawl in 1593 at the age of only 29.  

Another famous King’s School old boy was William Somerset Maugham who was brought up in his clergyman uncle’s family in Whitstable.  It’s claimed that in his autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, Whitstable becomes Blackstable and Canterbury, Tercanbury.   H.G. Wells who I recently learned is another Kentish writer was also prone to somewhat unimaginatively disguising place names.  He hailed from Bromley but in The New Machiavelli calls it Bromstead.   Before he began to write full time he was a teacher like yet another Bromley writer, Richmal Crompton author of the Just William books.  She was the Classics mistress at Bromley High School for Girls and lived locally in Cherry Orchard Road where she seemed to be able to combine writing with teaching reasonably effortlessly.

Poet Wendy Cope who I only came across a week or two ago was born in Erith.  Like Wells and Crompton she was drawn to teaching and taught for years before concentrating completely on writing.  It’s definitely true these days that most writers will need something other than their writing with which to support themselves but possibly this was not quite so crucial in the past.

One particularly acclaimed writer who found the Kentish countryside to provide a great deal of inspiration for his work, is H.E. Bates who lived in an old granary in Little Chart for 40 years.  He was apparently a very keen gardener and his home was renowned for his ability to turn acres of rough ground into a riot of colour.  He is said to have written a number of gardening books.  

I was recently told that Maisie Stone creator of Annie Violet the Story of an Edwardian Servant Girl is from the Gravesend area and lived locally for a number of years.   I haven’t yet read it but a few days ago I read, and enjoyed  Gravesend Girl Jennifer Barraclough’s just published novella, Cardamine from Overcliff Books.

My search for Kentish writers, most particularly those of North Kent, and even more particularly of the Gravesend area, turned up some interesting information even if not all of it is relevant.

Apparently R.M. Ballantyne lived in Ramsgate researching for The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands …. Frances Hodgeson Burnett based The Secret Garden on a house she rented in Rolvenden ….. Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabethan poet lived at Penshurst Place ….. Frederick Forsyth was born in Ashford and went to school in Tonbridge …..  George Orwell lived in Paddock Wood during his hop picking sojourns …..  John Evelyn lived at Sayes Court in Deptford which is sometimes seen as London and sometimes as North Kent, depending upon the view of the individual ……  TS Eliot wrote Part III of The Wasteland in Margate whilst recovering from a nervous breakdown.

And there are certain to be more from Gravesend lurking in the dusty corners of the world-wide-web.