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A SHRINE TO A SECULAR SAINT, and FRIENDS NEAR LONDON - JULY 15

In which we tour Darwin’s abode, Down House,

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and navigate onward to visit Yvonne and Mary.

July 15, 2006

Today we headed north from Wadhurst…..visiting Darwin’s home, and then going on up into the outskirts of London to visit Yvonne and Mary, Gail’s Outward Bound (1997) friends, in their homes.

There was an accident on A-21, that had completely blocked the highway, so we took to the back roads to get to Down House, where Charles Darwin spent most of his life.  This included about five miles of one-lane road (this is not an exaggeration, either—a single lane wide) with “wide spots” (but NOT a complete two-lanes of width, folks….still narrow) for passing.  Fortunately we found ourselves following a larger car, because it appeared that people who had been coming the other way on A-21 were using also using this “lane” as a bypass – we met dozens of cars (but, thanks to our friend in the lead, I was never surprised), and the passing was a caution!!  Folks backing up to find a place where we could squeeze by; running wheels up on the bank; folding the side-mirrors in to avoid damage; etc.  I really wish I’d been able to take photos of some of the situations, but I was awfully busy being sure the rental company’s paint wasn’t getting scratched! 

We had a wonderful time at Down House –  in the photograph of the front, you can see the middle part that was the original house, plus the two major wings that the Darwins (with part of the Wedgwood fortune brought by his wife) added to make it more suitable for their family.  Once inside, the downstairs rooms are all set up as much like they were when Darwin lived there as they can manage, using photos, old inventories, and the letters and other written communication of contemporaries.  The rooms, and the audio tour narration, serve to humanize Darwin as a man – I’d read about how his loving fatherhood was quite outside the mainstream for the time, but the homely stories (his children “punted” around his study on a rolling footstool, driven by his walking stick!  And he replaced the carpet on the back steps, and repainted the baseboards on the same stairs, almost yearly because the children would “sled” down them at high speed on a board!) and actually seeing the footstool, the stairs, and the schoolroom, made him more of a flesh and blood person that one generally is presented with in textbooks.  Despite all this, there is still very much an iconic approach to Charles…it reminded me very much of how many SDAs treat the memory of EGW, actually – and I haven’t been to any of the SDA “shrines”, yet.

This is all somewhat amusing at one level, but in Down House the history part of the tour (upstairs) continues to tell, and dramatize, the now falsified version of the “debate” between Huxley and Wilberforce.  This is the story of (as he is always identified) Bishop Wilberforce asking Huxley on which side of his family he claimed descent from an ape, and Huxley replying that he’d rather claim descent from an ape than from a bright man who prostituted his gifts to dogma and scorn…..or something like that.  The difficulty is that this story doesn’t appear anywhere until decades after the actual meeting – it bears about the same relation to truth as does the story about little George Washington and the cherry tree.  The standard misrepresentation of the Scopes trial as a clash of science and religion is also here.  And nowhere is it noted that most of the prominent scientists in Darwin’s day were “divines” – for instance, when they are being presented as his mentors, Henslow and others who were clergy are never identified as such.  Darwin’s role as a secular saint in the “Church of Naturalism” is preserved at Down House, and I guess it is silly to expect anything else.

We went outside and walked around the house to look at the additions that Darwin made for his family and servants,

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Here, you can again see the two wings that Charles added, plus the “tower” with its climbing vines, and the wonderful gardens.  We went from here to the kitchen garden, and to the famous “sand walk”, which runs through one edge of a nice grove of trees – I suspect these weren’t here in Darwin’s day – and then on the other side of the grove, the walk continues along the edge between the trees and a grassy field.  It’s a wonderful walk, and Darwin did many miles here during his 40 years at Down House.

Once finished with “religious duties” (as a biologist, I could not miss Down House!), we navigated our way on to New Eltham and Yvonne’s house,

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where we were greeted by Yvonne, her older sister Irene, and Mary.  We’d seen Yvonne and Mary at Susan’s in Hackney, but neither of us had ever met Irene – she’s not so bubbly and adventurous as Yvonne, but a quiet and calm presence who reminded us both of Aunt June.  After a lovely time in Yvonne’s garden, drinking elderberry cordial (I thought all cordials were alcoholic, but this turns out not to be true), we got into Mary’s car and went to her house

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to see it and her garden.  This photo hardly does it justice, but you get the idea—it is a haven of rest in a big city, filled with greenness, flowers and calm.

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It is (like Yvonne’s) a “semi-detached” – two mirror-image houses sharing the center wall – and Mary has lived there for the last 42 years, ever since she and her husband moved out of a London flat to buy their own home.  She has it fixed very nicely, and her garden is a showplace!  We looked at everything, chatted about family and houses, and then went back to Yvonne’s.  Ate a lovely “tea”, in this case a light supper, and went to bed.

P.S. Can anyone explain the British attraction to “semi-detached” houses – in effect, duplexes?  I mean, why are there so many, rather than single-family houses, or “townhouses”, which they call “terraces”?  Was there a tax that favored them at one time, or something?

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