The Orchard, Grantchester

15.07.12 (Grantchester, UK)

The Orchard, Grantchester, July 15, 2012

As with any photograph of Virginia Woolf, 

as with this one at The Orchard, Grantchester,

I feel the urge to fill-in-the-gaps.

That famous sunken look, limpid

as though to make thoughts appear

visible, casts beyond the mise-en-scene

of the daguerreotype, a glimpse

of the prime minister, of a hand extending

from within the dark filmy glass

of a motorcar. The adjacent photo

of Rupert Brooke, looking on ponderously, no less

walking barefoot and almost naked

in a wooded grove than indicting those

who travel via internal combustion.

The Orchard, whose pamphlet sells it as

“a corner of England where time stands

still as the outside world

rushes by,” seems now unsure it can remain so;

you queue patiently for tourists to vacate seats

as do scones wait for tea. As with all museums,

as with the Brooke Museum, the preservation of happened things,

I text to myself for safe keeping,

is not a sadness for the past of men

but a relief that we are not 

who we had once been.

Ahron snapped this timeless, classy photo of a
calf humping its mother. The look says it all.

The Orchard is most conveniently arrived at by foot, through a mile-long path that runs along the Cam and Balls Meadow, where cows graze and hump each other, and where there is not so much as a rickety wooden fence preventing you from going right up to them or getting trampled.

I am out this morning with Ahron and his parents Eddie and Debbie. We walk along the footpath to The Orchard and talk, remarking on how the river seems to be incredibly high and how, under more ideal conditions, one might find picnickers and barbecuers and families with kids running along the length of the fields. Now, unfortunately, the fields have turned to bogs, and you can see trails where bikes used to travel get swallowed up by standing rain and river waters.

I suspect that Ahron would rather not be out here with his parents. There are knowing grumbles. The post-teen displeasure of Sunday family-time. I had asked Debbie how far The Orchard was and they said they could give me a lift because they were going anyway. So, despite being guilted into coming along, he does an ok job of trying to look neutral. Well, okay, maybe not neutral. 

Debbie, Ahron, and Eddie. Quality, family time.

With cows and a black dog.

 The Orchard is a cottage sized building and a grove with tables and chairs. The inside of the building is laid out like a school cafeteria, you grab a tray and whatever food you're interested in, slide your gatherings along a track and pay at the end. You eat outdoors, sitting in cloth chairs that have been seeped with water and grime from the unreliable Cambridge weather.

After some indecision, we find a spot under a tree (in case it rains and in case it gets too sunny, you never know in Cambridge). The day warm, and the momentary sunlight gives way to clouds, which then gives way to sunlight. We wait for the tea to steep before we eat our scones.
  

I have a container of clotted cream and Debbie tells me that it's a traditional topping for scones, but it's not terribly healthy. I'm not sure what the United States equivalent of this would be. It's a very thick, fatty butter-like cream (also called clouted cream or Devonshire cream). I'd stupidly spread my jam on first and my clotted cream on second, making the somewhat unappetizing topping that you can see below.

My first English scones-n-tea breakfast! Hideous!

"If only I'd been present to discourse with the likes of Rupert Brooke and Bertrand Russell! I should think
men of such eternally ponderous stares could not withstand the might of this one." -Ahron

The Orchard was host to some of the turn of the 20th century's most famous writers and thinkers. Dubbed The Grantchester Group, they include E. M. Forster, Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, Augustus John, Maynard Keynes, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. On top of that, some of the other famous people who have "taken tea" at The Orchard includes Stephen Hawking, Watson and Crick, Alan Turing, Silvia Plath, Salaman Rushdie, A. A. Milne, J. G.Ballard, King George VI, and basically the whole of England.

Later, after we walk from Grantchester to Cambridge's City Centre, we stop off at the Fitzwilliam and listen to Asagi Nakata, a young Japanese pianist (seriously, she looked twelve or fourteen), play Debussy's Arabesque No 1 to a packed crowd in the portrait gallery. There are people, eyes closed, deep in thought, women leaning against their boyfriends or husbands, single men slumped kinetically to the floor, children standing quietly, hands clasped in their laps. There is always that "what do you do now" feeling once you're in earshot of a composition of classical music, as though you're require by decree of the music to repay the composition with exhausted, paralyzed looks. We stay through Debussy and then decide to head out.

Our next stop is Petrou Brothers, a fish and chips restaurant near the Grafton.