It was poet and idealist Rupert Brooke's picture-postcard Grantchester long before it was the brilliant, charismatic, crime fighting fictional character, clergyman Sidney Chambers', lead of the popular Masterpiece tv series set in the quiet Cambridgeshire village of the 1950s.
Still, the two seem to co-exist peacefully in the long, lazy, summer shadows that stretch across the green meadows by the River Granta attracting visitors to this sleepy little setting situated about two miles up-stream from Cambridge.
James Runcie is the son of ex-Archibishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. His six book series The Grantchester Mysteries was first published by Bloomsbury in 2012 and is currently airing its fourth series on U.S. television.
Grantchester was the site of Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlements and it was mentioned in the Doomsday Book. Queen Elizabeth I processed through Grantchester en-route to Cambridge from London in 1564.
Rupert Brooke was born in Rugby, Warwickshire, son of the public school housemaster, in 1887. He was considered a young Apollo for his striking good looks and golden hair and said by the poet W.B. Yeats to be the handsomest young man in England. He won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, where lectures on Literature, Philosophy and Art were of most appeal to him. Brooke enjoyed a big group of eclectic friends, including the writers E.M Forster, Henry James and Virginia Woolf and playwright George Bernard Shaw.
His tutor recommended he move out of Cambridge to focus more fully on his studies. In 1909, Rupert Brooke took rooms in Grantchester in a former farmhouse called The Orchard and later, next door to the vicarage. This was a serene and gloriously happy time for him, walking, camping out under the stars in summer, berry and fruit picking.
After the start of the First World War, a by-then world-traveled 27-year-old Rupert Brooke was posted to Belgium. He wrote and published numerous war poems, including The Soldier. In 1915 his troop ship sailed to the island of Skyros, Greece, where he died after developing septicaemia from an insect bite. He was the first Fellow of a Cambridge College to die on active service in the First World War and Winston Churchill wrote his obituary.
I'm a big fan of Rupert Brooke's poetry and Sydney Chambers of the Grantchester television series (played by the handsome James Norton) and so I was more than happy making a pit-stop in the village this July while traveling from my parents' home on the Lincolnshire/Cambridgeshire border, south to Kent, to visit one of my sisters and also my sister-in-law.
After a pot of tea in a deck chair the bucolic gardens of Orchard House and a walk along the river, the sight of a big group of people gathered outside of the vicarage and church had me wondering if there was a walking tour I hadn't read of. Turns out it the production crew was on location that morning making plans for the upcoming shooting of Season Five of Grantchester. A brief chat with one of the producers informed me that it takes one week to shoot the Grantchester scenes of an entire series, with locals appearing as costumed extras.
It must be a bit of nuisance to villagers to have their narrow streets and pubs and church commandeered for a whole week, but I'd imagine charitable causes such as the church fund benefit from the production fee.
Grantchester is just enough off the beaten track to remain a glorious, gorgeous, unspoiled English village of the story books. If you go, do plan on a cup of tea at The Orchard Team Room & gardens.
Rupert Brooke
Grantchester's Robson Green as Detective Inspector Georgie Keating & James Norton as Sidney Chambers
The Old Vicarage, Grantchester
(Rupert Brooke, Cafe des Westens, Berlin, May 1912)
Just now the lilac is in bloom,
All before my little room;
And in my flower-beds, I think,
Smile the carnation and the pink;
And down the borders, well I know,
The poppy and the pansy blow . . .
Oh! there the chestnuts, summer through,
Beside the river make for you
A tunnel of green gloom, and sleep
Deeply above; and green and deep
The stream mysterious glides beneath,
Green as a dream and deep as death.
— Oh, damn! I know it! and I know
How the May fields all golden show,
And when the day is young and sweet,
Gild gloriously the bare feet
That run to bathe . . .
‘Du lieber Gott!’
. . . would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .
Still in the dawnlit waters cool
His ghostly Lordship swims his pool,
And tries the strokes, essays the tricks,
Long learnt on Hellespont, or Styx.
Dan Chaucer hears his river still
Chatter beneath a phantom mill.
Tennyson notes, with studious eye,
How Cambridge waters hurry by . . .
And in that garden, black and white,
Creep whispers through the grass all night;
And spectral dance, before the dawn,
A hundred Vicars down the lawn;
Curates, long dust, will come and go
On lissom, clerical, printless toe;
And oft between the boughs is seen
The sly shade of a Rural Dean . . .
Till, at a shiver in the skies,
Vanishing with Satanic cries,
The prim ecclesiastic rout
Leaves but a startled sleeper-out,
Grey heavens, the first bird’s drowsy calls,
The falling house that never falls.
God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there’s none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton’s full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you’d not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve. . . .
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There’s peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I’m told) . . .
Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River-smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees.
Say, do the elm-clumps greatly stand
Still guardians of that holy land?
The chestnuts shade, in reverend dream,
The yet unacademic stream?
Is dawn a secret shy and cold
Anadyomene, silver-gold?
And sunset still a golden sea
From Haslingfield to Madingley?
And after, ere the night is born,
Do hares come out about the corn?
Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?"
