EASTER, ELY AND FREUD

I had a call from Elder Daughter during the week asking whether it was I or Younger Daughter who had mischievously hidden Easter eggs in her tubs of growing potatoes.

Well, both of us had been concerned that her Easter egg hunt had turned out to be less of a chase than we expected, even allowing for the impediment of glasses of champagne consumed beforehand in the spring sunshine of her Frome garden. Not so much a hunt as a harvest we thought: well, we should give her something to hunt for and discover in a quiet moment long after the shock troops of the Easter family get-together had departed.

Her garden lies on the side of a hill and when she came to the house, three years ago, it consisted of a simple strip of unpromising lawn surrounded by brooding and sentinel-like conifers. Now the garden is transformed, the trees are gone, flowers blossom from every corner and the expanse of grass is broken up with flower and vegetable beds. Not a corner is wasted.

The hillside descends, increasingly steeply, to the river Frome - on which, so I learned this week from Radio 4 - is being mounted the biggest exercise in counting and tagging young salmon ever undertaken. Fewer and fewer salmon are returning to the fold and the scientists want to know why.

Quite how it will help to count and tag the fish I don’t know; that wasn’t fully explained. My grandfather, who fished keenly for salmon all his life, maintained that the salmon’s decline was consequent on the Danes discovering rich marine feeding grounds somewhere off Greenland: a sort of superior restaurant quarter and conference centre for salmon from all over Europe. Once discovered, at the end of the 1960s, the Danes just scooped the fish out of the water by the ton. Presumably they still do.

Once this Frome hillside was covered in artisan terraces that dated from Georgian days. They became bigger, and the houses more substantial, the higher you climbed up the valley. This was the parish of Trinity presided over by a grand church at the top. You can still see a few remnants of these terraces today, now beautifully gentrified with large cottage gardens hidden away in a maze of leafy lanes. Sadly, four fifths of the parish was swept away, like the salmon, at the end of the sixties when bulldozing became as popular as the miniskirt.

The change from one townscape to the other is abrupt and horrid. One moment you are surrounded by leaves, by gentle stone work, by pleasing curves, by buildings, which however humble, fit the Georgian ideal of proportion. The next you are precipitated into a barren world of inelegant modern houses, themselves crumbling now after only forty years, the tangled lanes replaced by wide paving, the grand trees swept away and the whole shebang a weight on the soul.

Visual elegance ought to be so easy to achieve. It ought to cost no more to build a modern house to Georgian proportions, or terraces with a frontage and set on a gentle curve. And yet we don’t. And, what is more, no one can tell me why. Unless it be that these days the supreme qualification to be an architect or town planner must be to have a visceral hatred of the visual beauty of the past. We condemn the fascists for burning books while rewarding those who bulldoze our architectural heritage with knighthoods.

Oh dear, what a sombre piece this is turning out to be. Let me enliven it by mentioning Sir Clement Freud, who sadly, has been called to give entertainment somewhere known more for its harps and song than for anarchic comedic brilliance and cooking.

I did have the good fortune to meet him once, although I cannot for now recall either what the meeting was about or why I should have been present. I can only assume that it must have been something to do with politics, he being at the time the Liberal MP for the Isle of Ely. Perhaps it was a by-election, maybe even the Brecon and Radnor by-election of 1985 in which I had some minor involvement. We were in the same party after all - or at least on the same side.

I have no recollection whatsoever of what was done or said. Clement was supposed to be chairing the meeting and I seemed to remember he arrived late with little idea of what was supposed to be happening, which problem he resolved by appearing larger than life and delivering a succession of funny anecdotes.

None of which took us very far as regards the serious business of winning the election (although win it we did despite all predictions to the contrary). Being something of a Young Turk in those days I remember feeling rather let down by this most unserious of politicians and concluding that if he had won the Isle of Ely constituency on a electoral whim, he would lose it in the same manner. Which sadly he did in 1987

If I had had the good fortune to win the Isle of Ely I should have made a desperate attempt to hold on to it if only for the magnificence of Ely Cathedral with its great octagonal lantern. I should have sought permission to hold constituency surgeries underneath it. A better use anyway than that of Oliver Cromwell who stabled his horses there in the Civil War.

How the lantern and the Cathedral itself remains standing on such insubstantial fenland ground is indeed a miracle. For sheer architectural glory it must remain the finest in England.

Ah, I see we have reverted again to buildings. Time to stop, I think, and plant out the scarlet geraniums that I have just bought in town. God gives us flowers and trees, I sometimes think, to disguise the visual ugliness of our present day constructions and to enhance still further the skill of those unsung architects of long ago who were determined to weave beauty from a warp of bricks and stones.

The Photograph of Ely Cathedral is from the official Cathedral Website