This is not a Canterbury tale, but an account of a window, a garden and a cathedral.
I arrived in Canterbury towards the end of winter, on a Charles Wallace fellowship as the writer-in-residence at the University of Kent. Despite the overbearing dull pastels of the landscape, my first sight of the grey countryside bore a certain warmth. The trees, though bare, lived up to Kent’s reputation of being the garden of England.
Canterbury, in south-east England has its share of touristy clichés: cobbled streets, gardens, museums, universities, and all that history overshadowed by the fabled murder of Thomas Becket, looming over the Canterbury Cathedral.
All of this enriched my writing and time there. But it was also one large window that did the trick: the window of the flat I lived in on the university campus. A window, which allowed me to gaze at the world outside without having to participate in it. There was nothing pretty about this window. But it was large enough to let the sky in. By its side was the desk where I laboured; bleeding poems, scaring them into existence. In fact, I ended up writing a sequence of window poems.
Solitude and snow
My end of the campus was also very close to the highly popular Crab & Winkle way, a walking and cycling trail, which winds its way through the countryside, ending in the seaside village of Whitstable.
The trail is named after the railway line that ran between Canterbury and Whitstable from the early part of the 19th century. I ventured out on Crab & Winkle for the first time during my first weekend in Canterbury. There was snow, the last of the season, the first I had witnessed. And I somehow ended up thanking the window for that. Solitude and snow — I couldn’t ask for more.
Window 1
Blond boy in red t-shirt
washes dishes in the sink
two hours later
he is looking at himself in the mirror
plucking his acne out
the lights have gone out
Window 3
Is dark
Is shut
Is beautiful
Is small
Is cold
Window 4
Looks like a slab of butter
standing up to touch the roof
may be they’ll use it for toast
tomorrow morning
Window 5
Heavy curtain folds
a face appears
every now and then
to peer into other windows and
then write poems about windows
(Excerpts from the Window series)
Through the window, I mostly watched everyday campus life and a winter that was reluctant to depart. The university was peaceful and quiet as I hoped it would be and when I shut the window, the absence of sounds was eerily palpable. Only the wind and the sea gulls broke this silence.
It was the same silence I discovered in the trees of the Dane John Gardens, a small but haunting park, which dates back to somewhere around 1551. The garden houses a mound, which offers stunning views of Canterbury. However it was the trees that had me spellbound for days. They were tall, wise and stood side by side, without touching each other. They looked like old couples that rejoiced in their own company without needing each other.
The Dane John was adjacent to the city centre, a short walk away from the university campus. It was also just a few minutes away from the towering Cathedral.
Across the centuries, the Canterbury Cathedral, a world heritage site and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, has inspired literature, survived violence and war, besides being the centre point of politics in England. It must have been the weight of all that history but it was days before I made my first visit. And then I kept going back to learn more about English history, to understand its architecture, especially to trace the faded murals inside its crypts and stare at the stained glass windows. These windows told stories of their own and visitors vied with each other to digitally recapture the splendour in vain.
The window in my room was not stained or half as splendid. Yet, every time I was back in my room, there was nothing more comforting than the views it offered.
As the days passed, winter gave way to spring. The city was now in full bloom. Magnolias, cherry blossoms and oxeye daisies suddenly burst onto the grey landscape. Seasonal cheer filled most parks and gardens. My residency was coming to a close. All I could think of was of T.S. Eliot, and the first lines from his ‘The Waste Land’: “ April is the cruelest month, breeding/ Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing/ Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.” (from ‘The Burial of the Dead’, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot)
A writer and literary journalist, Anupama Raju’s first book of poems, Nine , was published in 2015.
