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Notes on places
Hill of ages

Lightly she scoops up
the city in her arms.
Even the winter sky shares her mood,
as it cracks,
scatters silver over watermeadows,
strikes gold from the Hampshire hog
of the Castle weathervane.
There are several hills in southern England named for St. Catherine of Alexandria, one of the most venerated saints in the medieval Church, held in high esteem for her intercessory powers. This one on the edge of Winchester was formed, like all the chalk lands of this region, by the geological processes of the Late Cretaceous epoch. Millions of years later, its position, with commanding views over the adjacent downland and the River Itchen valley, led Iron Age tribes to settle here and eventually build a fort at the top.

Rampart remains
Archaeologists have dated the original settlement to 550-450 BC, with the hill fort constructed around 250-200 BC. Does the later date of the fort indicate an increase in hostilities during those intervening two centuries or the growth of social organization and a collective will to power? Perhaps those causes went hand in hand. The fort’s ramparts and outer ditch are well-preserved, though the wooden guardhouses and palisades must be imagined. For some unknown reason, the site was abandoned around 50 BC. Had they known the Romans were coming, the Iron Agers might have held on to it.

The Clump
The next people to leave their mark were the Saxons, who used the ramparts as a burial ground. And in the eleventh century a chapel in the Norman style, dedicated to St. Catherine, was built at the summit. The chapel was destroyed in 1537, when the Reformation’s zealous agents were systematically erasing saints’ chapels, shrines, and other Catholic signifiers. The remains of the chapel are still there, buried beneath the beech trees, known as The Clump, that crown the hill.

On the level ground within the ramparts is a mizmaze, or turf labyrinth, one of the eight that survive in England. This mizmaze is believed to have originated in the seventeenth century. Legend has it that a poorly behaved student from nearby Winchester College, whom they banished to the hill for the summer vacation, designed it. To pass the time, he laid out the maze and cut the turf. Having completed this task, he went and drowned himself in the Itchen. I’m not sure what the moral of that story is, or indeed whether it has any veracity.
A more esoteric take on St Catherine’s Hill came from the author, Guy Raglan Phillip, who claimed that it’s a significant point on Britain's longest ley line, the Belinus Line.

Modernity intrudes from a distance, when the drone of traffic from the M3 occasionally reaches the visitor. The motorway, which cuts along at the foot of the hill’s eastern side, was as monumental an undertaking in its day as the Iron Age fort. Nowadays St. Catherine’s Hill, though owned by Winchester College, is a nature reserve managed by the Hampshire & Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, and British White cattle graze on its slopes. As much palimpsest as landscape, this is a place where the ages co-habit, and where a succession of Britain’s peoples have imprinted their culture on this simple chalk hill.
Notes on reading
La Goulue: rags to riches to rags

La Goulue arrivant au Moulin Rouge - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Of all the books I read to glean some historical background for my Calypso Bergère Mysteries series, my favourite is Janet Flanner’s Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939. Flanner wrote a regular ‘Letter from Paris’ for The New Yorker magazine, and this book is a collection of the columns, covering the period from when she first moved to Paris up to the eve of the Second World War. Flanner’s writing is more reportage than a first draft of history, but the pieces are acute, vivid, and gossipy. As James Campbell says in his introduction, ‘it would be a centimetre off the mark to say that Janet Flanners’s Letters from Paris of the 1920s and ‘30s grant you the illusion that you were there. Rather, they give the intense and delightful experience of reading someone who was there’.
Though Flanner writes of current affairs and cultural matters, her primary interest is in people of all classes and occupations. Through her pages the reader meets a fascinating cast of characters, some in their prime, some on the way up or down, others the subjects of short and idiosyncratic obituaries. One of the most extraordinary of the departed was Louise Weber, known by all as La Goulue, ‘the Gourmand’.
Louise Weber died in January 1929, at sixty-two. The daughter of a cabdriver and a laundress, she became, in her twenties, the most famous and adored can-can dancer at the Moulin Rouge, painted by Toulouse-Lautrec and pursued by bankers and aristocrats. She achieved wealth, notoriety, and residence in a swish house near the Bois de Boulogne. In Flanner’s words:
It was from this discreet mansion that La Goulue was invited to dance before a gentleman who afterward literally covered her with banknotes and turned out to be the grand Duke Alexis. She had charm, a dazzling complexion, and wit. It was the last great heyday for courtesans, and she made hay.
Alas, it didn’t last.
Then came her fall. She went to jail after some lark. She became a lion-tamer in a street fair. She became a dancer in a wagon show; Toulouse-Lautrec painted curtains for her, but she forgot them in some barn and the rats gnawed at them. Then she became a laundress. Then she became nothing.
In 1928, a filmmaker called Georges Lacombe was making a documentary about the ragpickers who lived on the outskirts of Paris. During the shoot, an old woman emerged from one caravan. It was La Goulue herself, and after a bit of encouragement she gave him a turn or two.
This was to be her last public performance. La Goulue died a few months later. Here are Flanner’s final words on her:
Her last interview was given to the weekly Vu. After the first glass of brandy of the interview she took out a cracked mirror; after the third glass she recalled her cab-driving father. After the fourth she remembered the Grand Duke Alexis and, on the promise of a box of face powder, even remembered her own son, who had died in a gambling den. A few weeks later her ragpickers took her to a city clinic, where she too died, murmuring as if declining a last and external invitation, ‘I do not want to go to hell’.
[Image of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's painting La Goulue arrivant au Moulin Rouge courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.]
Flash fiction
A grey squirrel considers her monument

Here (she thinks, in squirrel thoughts) I will have my monument, atop this hard, massive thing created by the ancient humans. And like the ancient humans, I will be displayed in a noble pose, the great matriarch of my squirrel clan, progenitor of countless generations - many, many more than the number of these things! - of children, who in their turn became mothers and fathers, progenitors of countless generations. (She adopts a pose.) My image will be like this: regal, resilient, compassionate, profound. (She senses a human approaching and turns to look.) Come no further, human, but admire, if you must, from a distance. (The human stops and points something at her. She returns to her pose.) Here, I will have my monument, and the squirrel clan will gather to honour and remember me. But how will I create it? Ah, when the time comes, I will, like the humans, imagine it into existence.
[Photograph taken in Guildford, Surrey.]
From the photo album
St Paul’s Cathedral, London, 5am

