Lakeland interludes
The English Lake District seen through different eyes
In 1924, Karel Čapek (chap-eck), Czech novelist, playwright, man of letters and supposed inventor of the word ‘robot’, toured Great Britain. The despatches he sent home for publication in the Prague newspaper Lidové noviny were later published in translation in the Manchester Guardian (1925) and then collected in a book, Letters from England (1926).1
It’s a likeable, civilised, often humorous, sometimes oddly wrong-footing little book, illustrated with Čapek’s own sketches. Reading it, I would occasionally put it down to think through some of Čapek’s observations. One of my favourite passages traces his recurring frustration and bewilderment with the English:
The man sitting opposite you in the train will anger you for two hours by not regarding you as worthy of a glance; suddenly he gets up and hands you your bag which you are unable to reach. Here people always manage to help each other, but they never have anything to say to each other, except about the weather…. But if you get to know them closer, they are very kind and gentle; they never speak much because they never speak about themselves. They enjoy themselves like children, but with the most solemn leathery expression; they have lots of ingrained etiquette, but at the same time they are as free-and-easy as young whelps. They are hard as flint, incapable of adapting themselves, conservative, loyal, rather shallow and always uncommunicative; they cannot get out of their skin, but it is a solid and, in every respect, excellent skin. You cannot speak to them without being invited to lunch or dinner; they are as hospitable as St Julian, but they can never overstep the distance between man and man. Sometimes you have a sense of uneasiness at feeling so solitary in the midst of these kind and courteous people; but if you were a little boy, you would know that you can trust them more than yourself, and you would be free and respected here more than anywhere in the world; the policeman would puff out his cheeks to make you laugh, an old gentleman would play at ball with you, and a white-haired lady would lay aside her four-hundred-page novel to gaze at you winsomely with her grey and still youthful eyes.
Such were the impressions of a visitor a hundred years ago.
If Čapek had mixed experiences in and thoughts about Britain, he almost unambiguously liked, or even loved, the Lake District.
Čapek forgets his homesickness and feelings of alienation by the shore of Windermere:
the delightful Lake Windermere [sic], which I drew on an evening so sweet and peaceful that I was left uneasy with happiness; the sunset was combing the curly wavelets with a golden comb, and here the pilgrim sat by the quiet reeds and had no desire to go home again, so dazing and peaceful was the water.
But it is perhaps the farm animals that for Čapek incarnate the serenity of Lakeland; they graze everywhere unwatched, unguarded, untroubled. Only people show hurried spirits.
There are many other beautiful things in the Lake District, thus, in particular, the winding rivers, the bushy and magnificent trees, the paths twining like ribbons, the call of the mountains and the tranquillity of the valleys, the crinkled and peaceful lake; and along these twining paths pant chars-à-bancs full of tourists, motor-cars fly, and women slip on bicycles; only the Sheep, the Cows and the Horses ruminate deliberately and without haste on the beauties of nature.
Hurried spirits troubled Čapek, at times profoundly. Reading a passage about London it felt like it was full of intimations of doom; of war and terror, which were indeed coming for Czechoslovakia in 1938 and for Britain shortly after:
for the first time in my life I experienced a blind and furious repugnance to modern civilization. It seemed to me that there was something barbarous and disastrous in this dread accumulation of people…. I only know that my first impression of this huge assembly was almost a tragic one; I felt uneasy and I had a boundless yearning for Prague, as if I were a child who had lost its way in a forest. Yes, I may as well confess to you that I was afraid; I was afraid that I should get lost, that I should be run over by a motor-bus, that something would happen to me, that it was all up with me, that human life is worthless, that man is a large-sized bacillus swarming by the million on a sort of mouldy potato, that perhaps the whole thing was only a bad dream, that mankind would perish as the result of some dreadful catastrophe, that man is powerless…. Perhaps some time later on I shall realize what at the first sight of it frightened me so much and filled me with endless uneasiness. But never mind now, to-day I have become a little used to it; I walk, run, move out of the way, ride, climb to the tops of vehicles or rush through lifts and tubes just like anyone else, but only on one condition—that I do not think about it. As soon as I want to bear in mind what is happening around me, I again have the tormenting feeling of something evil, ghastly and disastrous, for which I am no match. And then, do you know, I am unbearably distressed.
At the time of his death from pneumonia on Christmas Day 1938, aged 48, Čapek’s hopes for his country were failing. For fifty years Czechoslovakia would be in the grip of two of the most active instruments of 20th century modern civilization, fascists and communists.2 When Nazi German forces occupied Prague in March 1939, they went to Čapek’s address to arrest him; he was no. 2 on their wanted list. They were surprised to discover they’d been cheated by death. But they did arrest his brother and some-time collaborator, artist Josef Čapek, whom Karel credited with actually inventing the word ‘robot’.3
Josef died from typhus in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early April 1945, days before it was liberated by British soldiers. His body was lost among all the others. Josef’s gravestone reads:
Here Josef Čapek, painter and poet, would have been buried. Grave far away.
⁂
Towards the end of the Second World War, the Theresienstadt (Terezin) concentration camp near Prague in then Czechoslovakia was used as a dumping ground for prisoners from other camps as Allied forces advanced. Among those held were many Jewish children. In August 1945 three hundred of them were flown on Royal Air Force bombers from Prague to the airfield at Crosby-on-Eden, near the city of Carlisle, and then brought to a camp around a mile from the Lake District village of Windermere that Karel Čapek loved in 1924.
This was a scheme organised by Leonard Montefiore, who secured approval from the British government and launched an appeal for support:
Despite post-war economic depression, donations flooded in from all parts of British society—rich or poor, Jewish or non-Jewish. Montefiore hoped that the tranquillity of the English countryside could provide, over the course of one summer, a restorative environment for them after the horrors they had endured. (BBC)
The camp was sited on the now abandoned Calgarth Estate, which had housed workers making Sunderland flying boats as part of the war effort.
The children swam in and boated on the lake, explored the woods and fields, and played.
By 1946 they had all gone, most only stayed a few months. Perhaps any place offering kindness, enough to eat, clean clothes, a proper bed to sleep in and a sense of being fully human would have been as good. But in any case they became known as the Windermere Boys or the Windermere Children. “We had arrived in paradise,” said Icek Alterman. Icek had been in Auschwitz-Birkenau and Dachau before Theresienstadt.
⁂
My father lost both his parents not long before I was born. He had a much older sister who lived an hour’s drive from the San Fernando Valley in Greater Los Angeles, where we lived, but otherwise his family were far away. In 1954, travelling by train with his teammates across the United States to play in baseball’s Pony League World Series in Washington, Pennsylvania, during a stopover in Chicago he stepped off the train and was enveloped by relations who embraced him, kissed his face and smoothed his hair, before vanishing never to be seen again. Also never to be seen again were his distant family in the former Russian Empire, in Belarus and Lithuania where his parents had been born, before leaving as tiny children. His niece later traced the family tree but all the eastern lines disappeared during the Second World War.4 It’s hard not to make certain assumptions about what happened to them. Although my father grew up in a mostly secular house, where they ate white steak (pork chops) for dinner, his grandfather had been an orthodox rabbi.
There were other troubles for my parents at that time, on top of the double bereavement, and once my father had cleared the decks he took a sabbatical5 from work and our family travelled to Europe for an extended period. This was the 1970s, a very different time, and one where the Almighty Dollar aided travel for Americans. At one point we lived for six months in the English Lake District, with my sister and I going to (pre)school; I was three and she was six.
Our time there made a deep impression on my parents. (I can only remember a few moments: my father shaving off his moustache and pretending to think another boy and I had stolen it; sitting in a tractor with a farmer; feeding animals; playing with vehicles at nursery; the smell of cigar smoke in the cottage; my father setting his jumper alight lying too close to a little electric heater; being unable to find the toilet in a strange house and quietly wetting myself in a corridor.)
A few years after returning to Los Angeles my father quit his job and my parents sold up and moved to Windermere, opening a bed&breakfast, and that’s where I grew up from the age of seven. To many the move seemed strange, in particular because it meant a quite different and less affluent lifestyle, and I’m not sure that any explanation they’ve given has quite hit the mark. It is too big a thing to be explained rationally. Karel Čapek said that, “The most beautiful things in England … are the trees, the herds, and the people; and then, too, the ships.” I think it was something like that, a love of the combination of people and nature in the Lake District; an atmosphere. Perhaps also a feeling that it had been a good place to them before, when they had first come: here the pilgrim sat by the quiet reeds and had no desire to go home again.
After four years at junior school in Windermere I went to the local state secondary school, the Lakes School at Troutbeck Bridge. The school, which opened in 1965, is built on the Calgarth Estate land, where the Windermere Children were lodged after the war.
It’s typical of the Lakes School in my day (and of me then) that I didn’t know anything about the Calgarth Estate or the Windermere Children until fairly recently; I was interested in things as a boy but aggressively uninterested in anything ‘school’. It was also regarded as fatally unsound to take anything seriously or show any softness whatsoever. The Lakes wasn’t in conventional terms a good school though I made lifelong friends there. It seems quite a different place now, as well as being half the size it was.
I’ve lived much of my adult life elsewhere but in middle age I returned to the area and both of my children were born nearby. Many of my childhood friends also left and drifted back, especially to raise families. Many also haven’t come back and probably only dwell on this place in their thoughts rarely, if at all. But I think that we almost all feel something, however faintly, that is more or less the same. There have always been certain views here that no matter how well I think I remember them, give me a pleasant knot in my stomach when I see them again, and there can be a specialness about the people that I won’t profane by trying to describe. However much I enjoyed living in cities and the things in them that aren’t available in the Lakes, there was always this; sometimes only weakly, other times strongly.
⁂
I might make this a starting-point for admirable reflections on democracy, the English character, the need for faith and other things; but I would rather leave the whole occurrence in its natural beauty. (Karel Čapek, Letters from England)6
Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, December 2024)
Čapek visited England, Scotland and Wales, but though he wrote about Ireland he didn’t make it over. The Manchester Guardian changed to the Guardian in 1959 and began to relocate to London in 1964. Letters from England was first published in Great Britain in 1926, translated by Paul Selver. The current Bloomsbury edition (2004) was translated by Geoffrey Newsome. My copy (Selver translation), from which the quotations are taken, was printed during the war (1944), when there were severe paper shortages and rationing, so presumably there was strong demand and HM Government thought it good for morale.
In September 1938 through the Munich Agreement, Great Britain (whom Čapek had so admired in many ways) and France sold out Czechoslovakia to Hitler, allowing Nazi Germany to seize Czech border territories before finishing the job and taking the entire country the next spring, in defiance of the Agreement. (Patrick Hamilton’s London novel, Hangover Square, offers a strange and powerful picture of this from the other end, of being foresworn, one of those who have betrayed others, feeling it everywhere, inexpressible.) From 1939–1945 Czechoslovakia ceased to exist. After liberation, the country was taken over by Soviet-backed communists, first gradually and then suddenly through a coup d’état in 1948; four decades of communist rule followed, enforced by the Soviet Union, who crushed the Prague Spring uprising in 1968. (A Czech friend of my parents with her English husband had the best restaurant in Windermere for many years (1981–1999); she left Czechoslovakia in 1968 after the Soviet-led invasion and is still in Windermere.) Some people claimed that Čapek died of a broken heart, but a respiratory infection, lifelong spondyloarthritis and heavy smoking in the best tradition of the Slavic artist were probably enough.
The word robot was first used and became known through Karel Čapek’s play, R.U.R., Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play is relevant today, clichéd and boring as that is to say.
These regions (now independent countries) were not good places for anyone the Nazis hated or were otherwise hostile or even indifferent to during the Second World War. Some of the activities of Einsatzgruppe B in Belarus are depicted in the 1985 Soviet film, Come and See, a great work but not an easy one to watch. The Einsatzgruppen followed the German Army in its eastern conquests, for organised mass killing of ‘enemies’, mostly civilians.
The sabbatical was an elegant weapon for a more civilised age.
Čapek writing about experiencing Hyde Park, with its speakers, etc.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. You do live in a wonderful place.
Loved your recollections of family and our travels.