Ken Worpole’s ‘Brightening from the East: Essays on Landscape and Memory’, newly published by Little Toller, is our April Book of the Month. Luke Turner reviews, finding the richness of humanity brought to life in its pages.
In Ken Worpole’s writing, people are always at the heart of place. As he wrote in his influential 2013 essay ‘The New English Landscape’, ‘human life and the natural world are part of the same order of things, mutually shaping and changing each other through space and time.’ These words are the lens through which to read Little Toller’s new anthology from the social historian and writer, a fantastic volume that might hopefully bring Worpole’s work to a wider audience. Never opaquely academic but always deeply researched and sharp, alongside ‘The New English Landscape’ are essays on class and the domestic garden, cemeteries and the Italian cultural relationship to mortality, the Thaxted folk festival, Detectorists, and much more besides. He’s an energetic champion of little-known writers, artists and thinkers — I have had to set up an alert for second hand copies of D.W. Gilligham’s Unto The Fields, a long-out-of-print book about the Roding Valley (just the other side of the Epping Forest ridge from where I write) after reading Worpole comparing the book to D. H. Lawrence and J. A. Baker.
Essex shapes Brightening from the East just as it has Worpole’s life. At the start of the collection, he admits that he’s usually reluctant to bring himself into his work. I am glad he has forgone his customary reticence, for the autobiographical details help illuminate the rest. He was born during the Second World War to a line of East Enders involved in a hodgepodge of occupations – carpenter, pub pianist, iffy bookie, scrap metal worker, brewers’ clerk, palm reader. Joining the great population shift along the Thames Estuary, his family moved from London to Canvey Island and then The Bungalow, a ‘clapboard, colonial structure’ surrounded by fruit trees, with a railway line and the River Chelmer close by. Worpole describes a happy childhood in ‘a magical place, as if from an Edwardian children’s book’.
He is not writing nostalgically, however. These places, and the innovative way that the ex-Londoners lived in them, lit the touchpaper for his lifetime of curiosity and questioning. Worpole left school at 16 and for a while worked as a civil engineer, before switching professions. At teacher training college, he was sceptical about the focus on English folk culture that had little relevance to an urban population who lived in ‘the vernacular world of the crowded street, the tower block and the television set’. While on a placement in a rural school, he felt that the age-old ‘cyclical’ culture of village life – often fetishized for its close-to-nature “authenticity” today – might feel superficially safe, but in effect ‘hobbled the young’.
The past might inform the present, but only if we are careful in how we use it in our own time as we look to the future. As Worpole so beautifully puts it, ‘we are always living in different periods simultaneously; time is malleable within our inner selves. To be wholly modern would be to have no inner life at all’. His writing often conveys a frustration that Britain since the early twentieth century has been a nation where opportunities for new ways of living have been squandered under municipal banality, corporate greed and consumerist individualism – and sometimes all three.
Many of these signposts to doing things differently were presented by groups who are the recurring subjects of Brightening from the East: the elective communities that sprang up in the twentieth century Essex countryside, building settlements and often trying to survive off the land. These social pioneers were a heterodox bunch, encompassing Quakers, anarchists, horticulturalists, Christian socialists, naturists, the temperance movement and the Salvation Army. Othona, a non-denominational religious community open to all, still thrives out on the edges of the marshes. Those Essex communities might not have led to mass movements but, Worpole argues, they were part of an early twentieth century radicalism that helped usher in many of the societal changes from which we benefit today, from workplace rights for women to new towns. Though not a Christian himself, Worpole is enthusiastic about how nonconformist belief and a sense of duty to fellow citizens was a transformative force in the twentieth century, lamenting that ‘Today’s political culture seems threadbare by comparison.’
Don’t mistake this for a pessimistic worldview, however. His romanticism binds people and place in the same way as D. H. Lawrence, another recurring character here, wrote about how miners related to the rural landscapes beneath which they toiled. He is – if this does not feel too much like a contradiction – a radical who looks for solutions in the pragmatism of humanistic living, rather than ideology. Perhaps this is in his blood: Worpole’s East End ancestors were suspicious of authority and ‘anybody who might wish them harm, or, even worse, want to improve them… This is the back-story I suspect to my own political impulses over time.’ Ideology after all often (usually?) leads to bitterness, disappointment, resentment and the alienation of those who might otherwise be your natural allies.
The final pages of Brightening from the East are a tribute to his friend and colleague, the anarchist writer Colin Ward. Worpole reflects on what he learned from Ward’s assertion that the “social” and “political” are not the same thing. ‘The social is much larger, more inclusive, more porous,’ he writes, ‘we make and unmake the social world each day, and that is why it is so flexible and resilient.’ I read these words and think too of the Essex landscape, the hand-hewn pollards of Epping Forest in its west and the oozing flux of the marshes to the east, and between them the richness of humanity Ken Worpole brings to life in these pages. His warm generosity of thought makes not only for an authoritative and kindly guide to under-celebrated places and the people who called them home, but also offers blueprints for our own troubled times.
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‘Brightening from the East’ is out now and available here (£15.20). Read an extract from the book here.
Luke Turner is co-founder of The Quietus, and author of ‘Out Of The Woods’ and ‘Men At War’. Find more information on his books here.