‘Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged’

A month ago I was staying in Chipping Campden, in the Cotswolds. Having read nothing about the village before I went there, I consulted the OS map. A mile to the north were the familiar words ‘Burnt Norton’; the old house that gave its name to the first of T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets. Eliot visited the gardens in September 1934 with Emily Hale.

There are several Nortons; Norton Hall, Middle Norton farm, Chipping Norton. It’s ‘Burnt’ because Sir William Keyt, Member of Parliament for Warwick, caused a fire in September 1741. His mistress had deserted him (his wife was in London) and he’d taken to the drink. Both house and owner perished.

It’s now a private house, having been a school during and after WW11, then left deserted for 30 years. It sits on the edge of the Cotswolds escarpment, looking out over the Vale of Evesham. Girls in the top dormitories during the war watched the destruction of Coventry on the horizon. The public footpath passes below, a field away from the house, but I walked up through the woods for a closer view. If you look over the back gate you can see the pool, drained just as in section 1 of the 1935 poem:

‘So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.’

Still dry concrete, still brown edged, rather green with moss now.