Dorset - A Best Kept Secret

                                              

I’ve considered setting up a blog for some time now but it wasn’t until I attended a ReadToWrite conference on e-publishing recently that I was encouraged to do it. Writers Wendy Robertson, Avril Joy and Gillian Wales ran the conference.  They have taught me so much and have supported and encouraged me over the past few years.  Without their inspiration, I would not have reached the current point in my writing.  Wendy suggested that I create a blog and here I am.

I wanted to think of a name for my blog and then I remembered a poem by Rumi  (Jalaluddin Rumi – 1207 – 1273) in a volume called ‘Rumi: We Are Three’  translated by Coleman Barks.

My love wanders the rooms, melodious

flute-notes, plucked wires,

full of a wine the Magi drank

on the way to Bethlehem.

We are three.  The moon comes

from its quiet corner, puts a pitcher of water

down in the centre.  The circle

of surface flames.

One of us kneels to kiss the threshold.

One drinks, with wine-flames playing over his face.

One watches the gathering,

                                   and says to any cold onlookers,

                  This dance is the joy of existence.

I knew then that the name of my blog had to be ‘Dancing through Life’ which is the way I feel about the writing process.  It is pure joy most of the time.

I am an aspiring writer and I am currently working on a novel that I hope to finish very soon.  The novel was inspired by my love for South West Dorset.  My mother was born in this region and I have visited this beautiful county almost every year since I was born.  If you don’t know Dorset, it’s because it is a best-kept secret. Devon and Cornwall are always lauded as being the counties to visit but Somerset and Dorset are often overlooked by tourists in their rush to reach Devon or Cornwall.   Dorset has beautiful rolling hills and dramatic seascapes, lovely little villages and interesting harbours.   The Jurassic Coast has the same protection as The Grand Canyon so you can see that this part of Dorset is very special.   It is a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site.

I think this view is stunning but I am biased.



It shows the view along the Chesil Beach from the island of Portland.  Weymouth, together with Portland, is the sailing venue for the 2012 Olympics.

The Chesil Beach is famous.  It is 18 miles long and it is said to contain approximately 180 billion pebbles.  It stretches north-west from Portland to West Bay and there are treacherous currents and a strong undertow in the English Channel that borders the Chesil Beach.  There have been many shipwrecks in this area and there are communal graves in local churchyards for those who have perished on the sea. For much of its length, the Chesil Beach is separated from the mainland by the Fleet Lagoon which is a shallow area of saline water.  The beaches and the lagoon are important wildlife areas.

The pebbles on the Chesil Beach change in size along its length, starting off quite large in Portland and ending up at West Bay as small shingle.  It is said that smugglers landing their cargoes of contraband on the Chesil Beach knew where to find their booty, once stowed, because of the size of the pebbles.

This is a view of West Bay where the Chesil Beach ends.

Ian McEwan wrote a novel ‘On Chesil Beach’ which is set on the Dorset coast in the year 1962.  Edward and Florence arrive at a Dorset hotel after their wedding.  At dinner, in their room, they try to suppress their fears of the wedding night to come.  Their lives are transformed by the fact that they can’t talk about their problems.

Dorset has produced some famous authors.  The most significant one is Thomas Hardy whose rich language and brilliant stories lend themselves to dramatisation. His novels have been made into films and dramas, for example: ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ and one of his most famous novels ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’.  This is one of my favourite Hardy novels, together with ‘The Return of the Native’.  Hardy’s writing was brilliant but quite pessimistic and he believed strongly in Fate and that some of his main characters were born under a blighted star.  He was also a prolific poet, writing around 1,000 poems in his lifetime.  When I read that Sir Julian Fellowes had written a drama about the Titanic, which sank 100 years ago in 1912,  it made me think of Thomas Hardy’s poem:

‘The Convergence of the Twain’

(Lines on the loss of the “Titanic”)

I

In a solitude of the sea

Deep from human vanity,

And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres

Of her salamandrine fires,

Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant

To glass the opulent

The sea-worm crawls – grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed

To ravish the sensuous mind

Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near

Gaze at the gilded gear

And query: ‘What does this vaingloriousness down here?’

VI

Well: while was fashioning

This creature of cleaving wing,

The Imminent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate

For her – so gaily great –

A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew

In stature, grace, and hue,

In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:

No mortal eye could see

The intimate welding of their later history,

X

Or sign that they were bent

By paths coincident

On being anon twin halves of one august event.

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years

Said ‘Now!’  And each one hears,

And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

                                                    Thomas Hardy

Hardy was an architect and he was born in a little cottage in a hamlet called Higher Bockhampton, in the parish of Stinsford,  not far from Dorchester.  This cottage is owned by the National Trust but it can only be viewed by appointment as a tenant lives in it.

The cottage where Thomas Hardy was born.

He met his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford in Cornwall and in 1874 they were married.  Later they drifted apart and when she died he was so traumatised with grief and guilt that he channelled this by writing love poetry to Emma. In time, he married his secretary who was 39 years younger.    When he died, his ashes were buried in Poets’ Corner but his heart was buried, with Emma, in Stinsford churchyard.  Near to his grave, the poet Cecil Day Lewis, father of the actor Daniel Day Lewis, is buried, such is the admiration that poets and writers had for Thomas Hardy.  Many young writers, such as Virginia Woolf and D H Lawrence admired him and Robert Graves , in his autobiography ‘Goodbye To All That’, mentions meeting him in the 1920s.  Hardy moved to Max Gate, near Dorchester and this is where he died.  Max Gate is also a National Trust property.

Two other writers of note that lived in Dorset were William Barnes, a dialect poet and T E Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who wrote ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ and who lived at a place called ‘Clouds Hill’  near Wareham.  He was killed on a motorbike very near to his home.  My father told me a story about when he was a young airman and had been told to work in the military hospital, keeping the floors of the wards clean.  The matron told him off and T E Lawrence, who was a patient at the time, told him to ignore her (in stronger language, man to man.)  My father had a signed copy of ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ but someone borrowed it and didn’t give it back.

What a shame.  I can remember seeing this book on a bookshelf at home when I was a child.

So my first blog post ends now.  Next time, I will talk about ‘Moonfleet’ by John Meade Falkner, who set his children’s novel in this area.  See you soon.