For the daughter of an architectural artist, summer holidays meant more than visits to churches, historic houses and gardens: they were lessons in how to notice and celebrate the beauty of Creation
I’m no particular fan of Philip Larkin. His anxious, even defensive spirit casts a constricting shadow across British poetry, right to this day. Yet some lines of his choke me up. In the surprisingly environmentalist “Going, Going”, for example, he writes about how “For the first time I feel somehow / That it isn’t going to last”:
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
Clearly, there’s much more to Britain (which Larkin calls “England”) than its countryside and medieval history. Our cities and institutions, our rich diversity, even the continuing evidence of Victorian expansionism and industrialisation, more truly comprise our national identity – as the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics and this summer’s Commonwealth Games joyously demonstrated. Which means that we can discard jingoism, including Larkin’s own, but still be left with the feeling of these lines themselves; a local feeling for the rural, and for old cultural artefacts, that’s nevertheless so universal it’s to be found everywhere in the world.
But I find Larkin’s sketch moving because it evokes my own childhood. For a long time we lived on the west coast of Wales. My father’s family remained on the coast of Kent, so holidays meant a long haul cross-country. We’d set out pre-dawn, when even in high summer the grass was ghostly with dew, and arrive long after my bedtime. In the back seat of the Mini, I’d doze under a car rug that smelt of sick and petrol.
