In his tragically short, heroic life, the novelist Denton Welch (1915-1948) moved between two worlds – that of the Republican era Shanghai, China, where he had been born and spent his first years due to his father’s business there, and then the Britain of the 1920s through the Second World War. Uniquely, his work refers to these two realms – `Narcissus Bay’, a short piece, draws on his childhood experiences. He therefore belongs to the very select group of writers – J G Ballard and Mervyn Peake were others – who carried within them memories of two very different environments, and engaged with the challenges of somehow trying to bridge these.
Along with Jocelyn Brooke (see entry), who was to be a key champion of his work, Welch was the poet par excellence of the geography of Kent. He had many similarities with Brooke. He was gay; he wrote around the same time, and his work is saturated with his emotional response to the environment – in his case mostly in West Kent, around Tonbridge – where he lived from 1940 to his death. Unlike Brooke, however, he suffered greatly from the aftereffects of a car accident in the mid-1930s which meant that much of his life till his death were taken up with periods of profound physical discomfort, sometimes causing him to be unable to function.
There is one other parallel with Brooke – and that an unfortunate one. Both have been somewhat neglected in recent years. This is a huge pity. Welch’s work is beautifully crafted, subtle, sensitive, witty, and wise – much like Brooke’s. His `Journals’ show a sharpness of observation, and a breadth of interests, along with a tolerance and openness. His work should be far more widely celebrated and known. In his life he attracted the admiration of Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read and E M Forster. In recent years, Alan Bennett has written powerfully of the wonders and pleasure of reading the work of this remarkable figure.
`The Journals’, kept in beautifully illustrated notebooks (Welch studied art at the Goldsmith, South London, from 1933 when he returned from a year in China after his secondary schooling at Repton public school), edited by Michael De-la-Noy (published by Faber and Faber, Lonon, 1984, reissued 2011) are a good place to start engaging with his work. Welch’s connections with Kent were detailed, and deep. After his accident he had recuperated at Southcourt Nursing Home in Broadstairs, before moving to 54 Hadlow Road, Tonbridge in 1936. In 1940, with his long-term housekeeper Evie Sinclair, he moved to the Hop Garden in St Mary’s Platt, near Borough Green. This was to be partially destroyed by a bomb in 1941, and then wholly by a fire the next year. This necessitated them then moving to rooms above a garage at Pitt’s Folly in Hadlow. In 1946, he moved again for the final time to Middle Orchard, in the nearby village of Crouch. There he was to die in 1948, his funeral at Wateringbury Church, and his cremation in Charing.
The `Journals’ running from July 1942 to just before his death, are dense with references to his tours around the landscape he was living and working in. Reading them today, one is struck by a number of things. The first is just how busy Kent’s countryside was in the war years. It seems that Welch is forever describing encounters with people on his picnic excursions into what, today, would usually be quiet and largely isolated places – even though they are near to quite large towns like Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells. The conflict had caused this place to be peopled with troops, prisoners of war, and various other functionaries who, after May 1945 when things ended, largely faded away.
The second are the haunting descriptions he gives to places which have almost iconic status today at a time when they were suffering neglect, closure and destruction because of the War. Penshurst Place is presented as a lugubrious, silent monument with its windows partly shattered. The great house of Knole just outside Sevenoaks has a similarly forlorn air. Within all of this, Welch, who was unable to serve in the military for health reasons, somehow finds a life where he can visit tea shops (despite being told in one by the stern proprietor that only one scone is allowed per tea due to rationing) and going into antique shops. The very normal and routine is juxtaposed against the most abnormal – watching bombs fall nearby, and getting understandably jittery when loud clashes in the sky make him think more attacks are coming, before realising it is simply a dramatic thunder storm.
Welch was an inquisitive citizen – one that even in times as restricted as the ones he spent in Kent was forever exploring the areas around him, both built up, and natural. His work contains amazing descriptions of slugs, flies and spiders, as well as the fauna surrounding him. He clearly had a painter’s lover of visual detail. As social history, too, there can be few better and more insightful first hand, living and responsive accounts of a place at a very particular time and the people in it which avoids all the stereotypes or rural, honest folks or caring, patriarchal gentry.
There are two renditions of his experiences in the `Journal’ that give a taster of the wonderful things there. The first is a visit to Tudeley Church on 13th April 1943, long before it had been furnished with the extraordinary, complete set of Chagall windows which it has, and for which it is justly famed, today. Looking over a tomb with the epithet `Hic jacet Thomas Stydolf’, Welch writes of how:
`I had the desire to lie on the tomb and kiss the cold brass faces of the medieval man and his wife and her horned headdress. That is silly, I though, resisting the idea. What would anyone say if they came in and saw you lying on the chancel floor, kissing the tombs? They’d think you had fallen into a fit. But I knew non one would come in. Swiftly I lay flat on the stone and kissed the man’s face first. It was pleasant and comforting to feel my body pressed close to the hard stone. The cool brass on my lips was pleasant too. I move an inch or two and kissed the woman’s face, then I straightened my arms, raising my body into a physical -jerks position. I left the church and sat down in the dry grass of the churchyard.’ (`Journals’, Ibid, 64-65)
It takes a leap of the imagination to see church memorials as sites of sensual connection. But nor is there anything remotely creepy in this description.
Welch’s sensitivity to the stimulation of the world around him is evidenced again in his description on 13th January 1946 of Allington Castle, by the River Medway near Maidstone (see entry for Thomas Wyatt). There is nothing sterile or neutral about what he sees:
`Allington Castle and the river all cold and grey and swelling; something evil about its ancientness and turning inward, the windows like eyes that have turned into slots for money, nothing moving along the battlements, only the flag blowing glumly. … Over everything brooded the greed and joylessness But it had its own beauty, which was a beauty of mournfulness and lack of understanding. One was not tempted to scrutinise it, to separate the restorations from the ruin, one took it as it was and dumped it down into one’s mind as Gloom Castle, Castle Wet, Misery along the river’ (Ibid, 248).
Throughout the Journals, there are exquisite depictions of East Peckham, Mereworth, Yalding, Trottiscliffe, Sevenoaks – a cluster of other places figure, where he went with his closest carer and intimate, Eric Oliver. Welch is a tutor in how to look at things right before one’s eyes, and then interrogate, feel and see so much more than was at first there. This is also apparent in the works of fiction that he produced, so much of it heavily autobiographical, of which the most significant is perhaps `A Voice Through the Cloud’ (1950). Welch lived a truly intense, truly heroic life, and his work is the worthy response, and monument, to a landscape from which he evidently felt so much inspiration and which, for those who can be bothered, still exists to be seen in ways similar to those he experienced.