The Orchard

Something that's really charming about Cambridge is the proximity of the city to rural life--to fields and cows and surrounding villages. From Lawrence and Mrs. Lawrence's apartment in the heart of Cambridge, it's about a two and a half mile walk out to the village of Grantchester. (As Mrs. Lawrence said, the walk is about the length of two conversations--one on the way there, and one on the way back. Lawrence: We measure out our life in conversations.) The walk is charming--it's English pastoral landscapes at their best.

The destination was The Orchard Tea Garden, a little place that Francisco loves with tea and scones and clotted cream, to be enjoyed in the gardens.

We just so happened to visit at the best time of the year, when the leaves of the trees in the orchard were heavy with all sorts of blossoms.

Let's just say, Anne of Green Gables would have loved this.

The poet Rupert Brooke moved into the Orchard House in 1909 and later moved to the nearby Old Vicarage. From what I understand, he brought his friends around. People like Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein, John Maynard Keynes, and Bertrand Russell.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath hung out there later. Here are some excerpts from her letters, as found on the Orchard's website:

“Remember Rupert Brooke’s poem? Well we had tea by the roaring fire at ‘The Orchard’ (where they serve tea under flowering trees in spring) and the ‘clock was set at ten to three’ and there was the most delectable dark clover honey and scones”.

“We walked 15 miles yesterday through woods, fields, and fen, and came home through moonlit Grantchester and fields of sleeping cows”.

“Ted and I went up a green river in a punt … We had tea, honey and sandwiches under the apple trees in Grantchester”.

“Got up at 4.30 am this day with Ted and went for a long walk to Grantchester … I felt a peace and joy in the most beautiful world with animals and birds … We began mooing at a pasture of cows, and they all looked up, and as if hypnotised, began to follow us in a crowd of about twenty across the pasture to a wooden stile, staring fascinated. I stood on the stile and, in a resonant voice, recited all I knew of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales for about twenty minutes. I never had such an intelligent, fascinated audience”.

More pictures from the walk to Grantchester, interspersed with Rupert Brooke's poem:

". . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad's reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . ."

"God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
...
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
...
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;"

"Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"

I'm not sure that I'm a big fan of either the ideas or the form or the refrain of the poem, but it is what it is. If you read the whole poem, it's a little disturbing--very romantic and focused on youth and certain ideas of beauty. 

This picture (above, from our walk) is one of the only ones I got of the countless fields we passed (in cars and trains), full of the yellow flowers of rapeseed. Sadly, I didn't get a picture closer-up.

About them, Brook writes, 

"and I know

How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . ."