Letter from Berringford 2

Skye Cottage

Berringford

14 February, 1978

Freckled things

Happy Valentine’s Day to all young lovers!  And to all old lovers!  In fact, to lovers of every generation!     

I have a young rose in a large pot by the porch, and I’m trying to train it up the wall of the porch and then over the roof. In my gardening bible it says distinctly that this variety is a climber, and I feel that it would enhance the porch as it blossoms, but the rose has other ideas.  It keeps setting off along the ground.  Every stem I fix to grow upwards continues vertical for another inch or two to humour me and then turns and points resolutely downwards in a determined search for the ground.  Finally, I am beginning to feel that this is, after all, good.  God bless all wayward things!

Why should everything be trained and trimmed, classified and sorted, organised and told what to do?  The most interesting things are in the miscellaneous file.  We need the rose which sends out its shoots the wrong way; the child in class who doesn’t give a damn about marks; the shopper who does not follow the correct route in Ikea; the pavement artist and the street musician; the lonely man who hands out leaflets in Red Square;  the young traveller who has resigned from a safe and steady job; the aging traveller who refuses to spend their retirement sitting in restaurants;  all those who will not toe the line, bend the knee or knuckle under.  Now, more than ever, we need them all.

We need anyone who brightens the uniformity of these times, when Chicago, Tokyo and Istanbul are all turning into the same thing;  anyone who dares to go forward when all the others are turning back;  who decides to accept no more.  We need the people who do not laugh at the shortcomings of the last generation and can see a little further into the shortcomings of their own; who resist conformity for no other reason than that the flame of being human burns more brightly in them than in the rest; the people who say they have had enough and walk off on their own.  In these days of bowing to fashion and kowtowing to vogues, of global companies, customs and language, they are, without being aware of it, the one true hope we have.

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled…”

Gerard Manley Hopkins praised them a hundred years ago.  They are worth even more today.

I am sitting in my porch and have just read this letter aloud.  Having heard it clearly, and inwardly digested it, my rose will probably grow straight up!  Just to be contrary!  Well, I’ll soon see!