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©HULTON-DEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS
A BRITISH HERITAGE COMMONPLACE BOOK
In which we reflect on themes introduced in these pages
The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,
One is nearer God’s Heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth.
Dorothy Frances Gurney
“God’s Garden”
Our England is a garden that is full of stately views,
Of borders, beds and shrubberies and lawns and avenues,
With statues on the terraces and peacocks strutting by;
But the Glory of the Garden lies in more than meets the eye.
Rudyard Kipling
“The Glory of the Garden”
A day in the car in an English county is a day in some fairy museum where all the exhibits are alive and real.
Rudyard Kipling
1904 letter to a journalist
When I played drunks I had to remain sober because I didn’t know how to play them when I was drunk.
Richard Burton
“What an old-fashioned place it seems to be!” said Elizabeth-Jane, while her silent mother mused on other things than topography. “It is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden ground by a box-edging.”
Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most struck the eye in this antiquated borough, the borough of Casterbridge—at that time, recent as it was, untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism. It was compact as a box of dominoes. It had no suburbs—in the ordinary sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line.
To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green.To the level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund down and concave field.The mass became gradually dissected by the vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught from the belt of sunlit cloud in the west.
Thomas Hardy
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(describing Dorchester)
British people have a Socialist mind and a Conservative heart.
Albert Finney
Reform! Reform! Aren’t things bad enough already?
Mr. Justice Astbury
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