Would I Were in Grantchester

Shelton, Norton in "Grantchester"

Norton, Shelton in “Grantchester”

Julia and I have become fans of Grantchester, BBC’s crime show about an Anglican vicar who thinks he is returning to bucolic bliss after the horrors of World War I, only to find himself solving a murder a week. When I heard that the story owes its source to Rupert Brooke’s “The Old Vicarage: Grantchester” (1912), I of course had to track the poem down. I discovered that it contains some of the tensions, in embryo, that appear in the television series.

The poem is pure Georgian pastoral. Brooke wrote it during a trip to Germany when he was recovering from a mental breakdown, caused in part by a woman rejecting him, in part by confusion over his sexual identity. Looking at Berlin’s “keep off the grass signs,” its tulips blooming “as they are told,” and its spirited beer-drinking Jews (his discomfort sounds anti-Semitic), he is overcome by nostalgia for England.

England has wild flowers and mysterious streams and (“Du lieber Gott!”, sweet God!) nude bathing. Like Kenneth Grahame in Wind in the Willows, Brooke imagines the “Goat-foot piping low” amongst the foliage. He pictures Granchester as inhabited by the ghostly presences of Byron, Chaucer, and Tennyson, who are sporting on the green along with departed vicars and deans. At one point he waxes so poetic that he becomes a little self-conscious, as though realizing that he’s overdoing it:

The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

As it turns out, he’s nostalgic only for Grantchester, not the rest of England. I don’t know the country well enough to identify his topical allusions and regional sterereotypes—for instance, who are these strong Madingley men who “blanche and shoot their wives, rather than send them to St. Ives”?—but the contrast is clear. He doesn’t go for “mean and dirty” Ditton girls, Cockney-speaking Barton men, crime-committing Cotonites, etc., etc. That’s not real England, as Sarah Palin might say.

But it’s into this world that Sidney Chambers ventures, often in the company of  a hard-drinking, hard-smoking urban detective. Other things intrude as well, including the jazz age (Sidney’s sister has an African American boyfriend who runs a nightclub), PTSD from the war, a reticence that sabotages Sidney’s relationships with beautiful women (is there a hint of Brooke’s bisexuality in Sidney?), and modernity in general. Even in Barchester we run up against abusive and philandering husbands, homophobia, xenophobia, and other ills. A deep part of us wants Sidney to restore order so that he can go back to worrying about the wisteria that is taking over the rectory.

In that way Grantchester is in the tradition of Agatha Christie, where murder is mainly objectionable because it is socially gauche. This series is more interesting, however, because of the Anglican sermons that we get from Sidney and sometimes his curate. Unlike the poem, which ends with a call for teatime, the series wants to make sense of the challenges England is facing.

Brooke himself, not only his poem, helps shape Grantchester. Like Brooke, Sidney is a beautiful man, but unlike Brooke he has (obviously) survived the war. The series is therefore able to imagine how Brooke might have developed had he lived.

He certainly would have become less naive. Brooke is most famous for the starry-eyed “Soldier,” written with the same nostalgia that we see in “The Old Vicarage”:

If I should die, think only this of me:
   That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
   In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
   Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
   Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
   A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
   Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
   And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
   In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Brooke could remain sentimental and patriotic because he never saw live battle and then died of an infected mosquito bite before the horrors of trench warfare set in. Two years later, it would be impossible to read “The Soldier” without a bitter laugh. Wilfred Owen’s “Futility,”  for instance, takes Brooke’s sweetness and turns it on its head.

The television series, to its credit, uses “The Old Vicarage” as a jumping off point. We may think we want to return to Georgian England but we don’t really. The world outside, dangerous and messy though it is, is also vibrant and exciting. Barchester becomes less of a destination and more of a retreat that we go to for spiritual renewal.

Here’s the poem. The Greek expression is translated in the phrase the follows it.

The Old Vicarage, Grantchester

By Rupert Brooke

(Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)

Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
                            ‘Du lieber Gott!’

Here am I, sweating, sick, and hot,
And there the shadowed waters fresh
Lean up to embrace the naked flesh.
Temperamentvoll German Jews
Drink beer around; — and THERE the dews
Are soft beneath a morn of gold.
Here tulips bloom as they are told;
Unkempt about those hedges blows
An English unofficial rose;
And there the unregulated sun
Slopes down to rest when day is done,
And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
A slippered Hesper; and there are
Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton
Where das Betreten’s not verboten.

ειθε γενοιμην . . . 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. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .

Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

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