Two Tales, Passing through Brentford, A serpent in Paradise
ENCOUNTERING HISTORY WHILE OUT WALKING
Two Accounts
Engraving below by William Hogarth
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On Passing Through Brentford Recently
It is perhaps just an oddity of mine, but I have a strange feeling that a walk through a town, the crossing of a bridge, the climbing of a hill, some sort of physical motion, allow me to engage in time travel. On a recent visit to England I crossed Kew Bridge and set foot in Brentford, now part of the greater London area and once the county town of Middlesex.
I had read somewhere that Julius Caesar and his troops crossed the Thames at a location that now lies on the banks of the Thames at Brentford. Some believe the crossing took place at Walton closer to London, no matter. There is a widely accepted opinion that Caesar fought his way north of the Thames to defeat a local tribal chieftain named Cassivellaunus, and that is good for the book. In any case his crossing the Thames pales into near insignificance when compared to his crossing another river, the Rubicon. After all Caesar's second invasion of south eastern Britain was something of a washout, even in his own estimation.
I continued my walk westwards and soon came across a public notice giving a brief survey of Brentford’s history. After a brief mention of Julius Caesar's alleged act of crossing the Thames it gave an account of the battle of Brentford in 1642, the year which saw the beginning of the civil war between the Royalist and the Parliamentarian sides. After the battle of Edge Hill King Charles I was resolved to put paid to the rebellion by capturing the enemy stronghold of London. The battle ended with a royalist victory, or seemingly so. The enemy forces were expelled from Brentford sure enough, but as in the case of the Alamo, it spelt defeat for the victors by stiffening the resolve of those resisting them and allowing these a breathing space and therewith an opportunity to consolidate their defences.
All this was new to me. However a memorial to John Wilkes I came across shortly afterwards jogged my memory of history lessons I had experienced in my school days. Wilkes put up strong resistance to the encroachment of regal power, albeit here in a non-military fashion. After conducting a stinging propaganda campaign again the Earl of Bute, then Prime Minister and the leader of the “King's Friends” in Parliament, Wilkes incurred the displeasure of King George the Third and his political establishment, By cleverly exploiting the emotive force of the word Liberty Wilkes gained the sympathy and support of the electors of Brentford and so it was that Wilkes became the member of Parliament representing the good citizens of Brentford though the influence of the court prevented him from taking up his seat in the House of Commons. In fact Brentford reelected Wilkes in defiance of royal influence. The cause of Wilkes converted the word Liberty from a term with a certain patriotic ring, especially among those who admired the founding principles of the Roman Republic, to a revolutionary slogan soon to be exploited by advocates of democracy in America and France. An unfortunate record of Wilkes’s prestige is preserved by the name of Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. To complete a circle, I might add that Booth saw in Lincoln a reincarnation of Julius Caesar. Unable to dispatch Caesar on the Ides of March, he did manage to “avenge Virginia” on the Ides of April.
I now felt like a beer and had one at a pub along the way. On leaving I remarked to the lady bartender that I fully acknowledged the pivotal role of Brentford in British, nay world, history. She smiled and said I should come back some time, but did not offer ”one on the house.”
I continued my way on this overcast drizzly day until I found the local railway station and then took a train to Tottenham Hale.
2. An Excursion to Salzburg
In the August 1961 I was in Munich to visit a family I knew in the course of an exchange agreement allowing me to stay a few weeks in Munich and a German boy to visit my family in England. I had completed my first year of study at University College London on a course that led to an Honours degree in German and French. I had always wanted to visit Austria and now was my chance, for Salzburg could be reached by train within the space of an hour or so,
In the first place I associated Austria with Mozart, Franz Schubert, waltzing, the Blue Danube, pretty Dirndl costumes, schnitzels, Apfelstrudel the Alps, things high and lofty in both artistic and geographic terms. I did get one warning, though, from my friends in Munich. In Salzburg it’s always raining, or almost always. It was therefore with a sense of relief and happy anticipation that I arrived in Salzburg on a fine sunny morning. I should really have done more prep work on Salzburg as I had little precise notion of its artistic and architectural glories. These I can now enumerate like anyone on the Internet, but to what avail? Was it not advantageous even, if back then my ignorance exposed me to every new impression Salzburg gave me from one moment to another, without the prejudice of clear expectations, so to speak. Thus it was that I ascended leafy slopes around Salzburg to be then rewarded by the glorious vision of a castle here , a splendid cathedral there and a monastery round the next corner. I experienced transports of elevated feelings that almost threatened me with detachment from the real world, whatever that might be. At ground level I was enchanted by the view of Mozart’s birthplace and pleasantly surprised by encounters with actors, performing artists and minstrels who, as I soon learned, were participating in the Salzburg Festival. Little did I know about the festival itself and nothing at all about its history or the role of Max Reinhardt in laying its foundations.
I wandered around so much that I must have lost my sense of time until the late afternoon when Salzburg was bathed in golden light. I crossed a bridge of the river Salzbach, not that I had any knowledge of its name on that day and then found myself in the Mirabell Gardens with their ornate geometrically laid out flower beds and their orchard of fruit trees bearing sweet-tasting yellowish plums called Mirabellen. Was I in the Garden of Eden already? Tut tut! Steady there! I surely did not entertain this thought at the time and if my account is in any sense true and valid I should not “gild the lily,” embellishing hardcore events with superfluous poeticisms or distort a reportage of verifiable facts by yielding to ulterior motives and the prejudices they engender. Let only the sequence of real events owing nothing to my conscious volition determine all I tell.
Soon it would be time to go. I was sitting on a park bench and on another bench close to my own sat a benign-looking elderly gentleman of the grandpa ilk
He asked me where I was from.
” From Munich,” I replied in my best German, not wishing any accent to reveal my English identity. Not that I was ashamed of this, of course, and would probably have disclosed more about myself but for his next utterance.
“Hitler war ein guter Mensch.”
I was frozen for the moment, too shocked to say a word. The old gentleman went on to explain that Hitler had seen to it that ordinary people such as he received a portion of land with which to support themselves and their families.
“Ja, ein guter Mann”
“Aber nicht fuer die Juden” I interpolated by way of what I meant to be a harsh rebuttal of his claim that Hitler was “a good person.”
His enigmatic and inscrutable half-smile showed no sign that he took my point as he concurred: “Nein, nicht fuer die Juden.”
That was the end of the conversation and much else. At least I retained my love of Mozart and Apfelstrudel.
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