Water, water everywhere...

As I sit in the workroom of the Jerwood Centre, I am distracted by the way the water is streaming down the sides of Silver How. Unmapped tricklets and ghylls that catch the sun on a bright day are now bands you can make out from this side of Grasmere through the sheets of rain. I have never found the phrase 'sheets of rain' an accurate one before now.

The village is flooding. We have even more bodies of water than before, and roads are rivers. Luckily, or more likely with intent, Dove Cottage was built on a raise. But this is truly something I have never experienced. It has washed back memories of Enid Blyton tales where children battle through soup like floods to save the farm. And I remember how back home the end of our avenue would flood, and my best friend would join me building a small toll bridge for pedestrians from bricks and planks. But this is real and dangerous, threatening the safety of people and buildings.

It seems appropriate that I'm currently reading Jonathan Bate's 'Romantic Ecology'. Bate reminds the reader how the weather and seasons of Wordsworth's poetry are not only geographically-specific, but also act as markers that allows us to gauge the way our climate has changed since then. Dorothy's journals make no mention of flooding, but this description is worth reproducing:

Wednesday morning 9th December 1801
... The river came galloping past the Church as fast as it could come & when we got into Easedale we saw Churn milk force like a broad stream of snow. At the little foot-Bridge we stopped to look at the company of rivers which came hurrying down the vale this way & that; it was a valley of streams & Islands, with that great waterfall at the head & lesser falls in different parts of the mountains coming down to these Rivers...

A Mr Ostle, who lived in Northern Cumbria, kept a journal and recorded this incident that is as close to the conditions - and people's reaction - that I can find:

November 1861
Weather very stormy, heavy winds and large floods. Fields all covered with water. Different times there was the most water upon the ground since the memory of the oldest man in the holme. The floods they have done a great deal of damage in many places. I think it was the nearest the flood in the days of Noah.

Up-to-date

Having resolved to keep a journal Dorothy Wordsworth wrote that she continued to do so "because I will not quarrel with myself". An excellent determination for a diarist and a sentiment that I think a good one generally.

In my first post I wondered whether the fires had been lit for the Wordsworth's arrival in darkest last winter of the eighteenth century. I now know that they were welcomed by the warmth that had been fostered for them by Molly Fisher, who lit the fires in the cottage for two weeks before they came. Welcomes here are still warm, and we even have a Molly amongst us, though in our house the fires are thanks to Mark Ward who makes these happen as well as poems and many other things. It's been a fortnight since I arrived here and a happily busy one, so apologies for the lack of frequent posting to those of you who have complained which flatters me and scares me at the thought that my little blog has readers. Town End as it is now appears to me a fitting tribute to the Wordsworths and their poetic community. Living, working and writing together gives the place a lively and unique atmosphere.

The only slight disappointment has perhaps been the postponement of the Tony Harrison Robert Woof Memorial Reading, but this will still take place on March 3rd. There is also the exciting 2009 programme of 'summer' poetry readings now up on the website to look forward to.

So, I shall be back soon with more to say. If you want to read about anything in particular let me know and I shall endeavour to satisfy your curiosity.

For now,
Emily xx

Read and recommended

Jonathan Morley's 'Backra Man'--buy it and buy me the accompanying CD.
Mario Petrucci's 'somewhere is january'--looking forward to the extended sequence and frankly in love with Perdika Press.
Dorothy Wordsworth's 'Grasmere Journals' as edited by Pamela Woof--strikingly beautiful introduction.
Thomas De Quincey's 'Lives of the Lake Poets'--TDQ's a master of the anecdote though hardly the most reliable, like Heat but with literacy.
Selima Hill's 'Gloria' and Christopher Middleton's 'Collected Poems'--working my way through both of these hefty portions. Hill's poems are a constant delight, Middleton I'm newer too but like very much.

Welcome

Dove Cottage was a home to William Wordsworth for just under a decade. Here he lived with his sister Dorothy, and later was joined by his wife Mary Hutchinson and their children. Wordsworth and his sister moved here in on December 20th 1799. This was around the same time of year that I visited the museum for my interview, and the view from our century was of the Cumbrian landscape quilted in snow. The lakes as black as pupils, holding the image of the white peaks all the more clearly. Under the climate of Europe's Little Ice Age we can assume that such sights greeted the siblings on their arrival. Then the house, previously the Dove and Olive inn, would have looked out over the mere itself as our terraces a future obstruction. When they took up their tenancy the building had been unoccupied since the inn had closed for business in the early 1790s. I wonder if someone had kindly gone in to make a fire before their arrival, so the flagstones should not be as unwelcomingly cold. I think for all the Romantic feeling in the world it is perhaps hard to fall in love with a house if it does not give some relief from the harsh natural world it is set within.

I had been to the cottage once before, and the memory had belied how small the place is. The rooms are not cramped--most citizens of the country at the time would surely have considered their proportions palatial--but they are not large, and the ceilings are low (which makes me feel of a normal stature for once). In that first experience my mind had adhered to peculiar historical facts, most insistently that tea was locked in a caddy while opium was less well guarded. On the subject of opium, Thomas de Quincey, author of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater, stayed with Wordsworth and loved the cottage so much that he took up the tenancy after the family left. De Quincey was far form being their only guest, and it seems one of the reasons for the Wordsworths left was apparently the lack of space, friends--among them many famous figures of their day--sleeping on the flagstone floor. However, such numbers pale in comparison to the present day; Dove Cottage now sees approximately 70 000 visitors a year.

It is less than a fortnight until I am resident in Grasmere. I will be part of a year-long internship programme at the Wordsworth Trust with nine others. At this stage I'm excited and totally unorganised for the move. As interns we will be working at Dove Cottage and the museum there, living just across the road in the terraced houses that make up most of Grasmere's beautifully monikered 'Town End'.

This blog will be about a multitude of things, including the conservation and heritage work I will be getting an education in. It will also be a space for writing about the Romantics, both those who made this place famous and those connected to them (and they are mostly connected, Romantic writing is about and of a community), and about contemporary poetry, which also has its place in the Wordsworth Trust.

It's this complementarity of Romantic and contemporary poetry that has brought me to the Wordsworth Trust. I hope you enjoy reading this journal.