Landscape and people

Interview with Jack Surtees

Northumberland consists of tales and vistas. A truth well known to the author Max Adams, for whom these elements have both inspired and ensnared. His musings on admirals, artists, and the wisdom of wandering have drawn heavily from northern lore, the destination of his emigration, and earned him considerable esteem in the British literary world. His journey to this point, though, has been rather tumultuous and, in fact, even his arrival in the North East was via a rather curious route.

 “In 1991 I was living in Wakefield, working as an Archaeologist and I suddenly had a sort of inkling that I wanted to buy a wood. I can’t quite remember why. Anyway, I decided it was a great idea so my then partner and some friends had a rather drunken evening talking about how we would buy a wood and go and live in it. And then, we did.

 “The wood was in Beamish, County Durham and, as far as I know, we were the first people ever to get a mortgage on a wood. My partner and I moved into it in a caravan, in a blizzard, with a 3-month-old son and in order to pay for it I thought ‘I’d better get a job’. So I applied for a position at Durham University, Director of Archaeological Services, and fortuitously I got it, because we were broke. It was a bloody awful job but I had freedom. I was the director of my own unit and research wise we could do what we wanted, so we set up a project in the Cheviots.”

Having grown up in suburban London before moving to York and then Wakefield, the Cheviots, isolated as they are, presented an entirely new environment for Adams to explore and allowed him a first taste of Northumberland’s unique charm. Home to prehistoric settlements, medieval kings, saints, outlaws and generations of heroism, these were the tales which drew his eye while the landscape weaved its enchantment. So alluring was it that, even when life’s difficulties seemed overwhelming, it was this relationship with the region that consistently offered Adams renewed hope.

 “I worked at Durham University for six years before I left because I couldn’t stand it any longer. I went back to live in the wood but an altercation with some rather unpleasant people led to me having to leave. I was then homeless for a while and lived out of a cabin in Ovingham. I had a few odd jobs, working as an Office Clerk and that sort of thing, and then in 2003 I got a lucky break. I applied for a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship and by sheer fluke I got it.”

The fellowship was awarded to research an unjustly forgotten tale, the life of an intrepid sailor forged on the banks of the Tyne, Vice-admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. Considering the extent of his influence during the Age of Sail it’s remarkable how few know of the man who stepped in after Nelson’s death to lead the British to victory in arguably the greatest and most terrible naval battle in history. What’s even more remarkable is that his true brilliance stemmed not from his heroism in battle but from his extraordinary perception. His was a life well worthy of study and, having provided salvation to Britain on more than one occasion, his deeds would now offer Adams a similar escape.

Named for the patron saint of Northumbria, Collingwood was born in 1748 to a well-to-do but poor family in Newcastle. During his formative years Britain was flexing its imperial power like never before and Newcastle had become an international city of trade, hosting ships exporting exotic goods and, more importantly, news from across the world.

Growing up not far from the Tyne, it’s easy to understand how young Cuthbert’s imagination might have been stirred by tales of naval heroics so it’s not surprising that, aged only thirteen, he joined the Royal Navy to sail as midshipman under the command of his uncle, Captain Richard Braithwaite. Once aboard his work ethic, tenacity and unique intellect ensured a steady progression to leadership during decades’ worth of commissions in the Mediterranean and the West Indies.

“Collingwood was interesting, not because he was a great derring-do sea captain, but instead because he was a brilliant thinker and an amazingly modern humanitarian. Not modern politically but modern psychologically, his writing makes it clear that he’s got a very interesting mind. For someone who spent forty years of his life alone at sea, in a position of command where you have no friends, to develop his level of sensibility is extraordinary. He saw a long way. He saw into the future and he saw into people’s minds.”

 It was this gift of perception that allowed Collingwood to lead so effectively. He was a man of great humility, who held a deep compassion for the welfare of those aboard his ship, whilst also being renowned as a Captain known to bring order to trouble makers. His was an authority not to be questioned.

 “He understood people very very well and wrote beautiful English, really wonderful English, and yet nobody reads him, except naval historians. He’s one of the great 18th-century letter writers, reflecting on life to his family and friends, reflecting on the state of things, Napoleon, what men are like, what women are like and it’s a huge pleasure to read his writing. As an observer of people he’s absolutely top notch.”

This keen perception extended beyond his own men as he was also admired for his ability to read the mind of the enemy. One example being his deception of a vast French battle fleet in 1805, when — with only four ships — he was able to block their passage by convincing them he had a far greater force hidden over the horizon; another would be his actions following Nelson’s death during the Battle of Trafalgar, where his command oversaw the capture or destruction of twenty-two French and Spanish ships while incurring the loss of none of their own. Arguably though his greatest action came following that battle.

With thousands of captured sailors under his command, he decided to release all of the Spanish prisoners, writing a letter to accompany them back to the mainland. The politeness and dignity he displayed in this moment of victory was instrumental to the Spanish changing sides later in the war. The importance of this moment in the eventual downfall of Napoleon cannot be overstated and it serves as a decisive example of the Northumbrian’s sensibility being mightier than his brawn.

 Cuthbert Collingwood lived in an age of swashbuckling warriors and derring-do leaders, yet he himself was extraordinary for all his uniquely humane qualities. For his humility and empathy, perception and humanitarianism. These were the traits that distinguished his meteoric rise from midshipman to Vice-Admiral, and perhaps the greatest tribute to his deeds comes from Adams himself¹⁵.

By the time that he died, at sea on March 7th 1810 on his way home from Menorca, he had ensured final British victory at sea against the French not by winning battles, but by preventing them.

Following the conclusion of his research, Adams returned to the North East and decided to shed some light on the forgotten subject by documenting his findings in the form of a book. London based publisher Weidenfeld and Nicholson became interested and Admiral Collingwood: Nelson’s own hero¹⁶ was published in 2005.

 “That set me on the path to thinking, having been through three careers already and having walked away from all of them, I thought I might try my hand at being a professional writer. So I wrote another book about another Geordie who I thought was rather neglected, a guy called John Martin¹⁷.”

The fourth son of a one-time fencing master, John Martin came from Haydon Bridge in the Tyne Valley, and presented a very different subject to that of the distinguished war hero, Collingwood. Born in the week that the Bastille was stormed, Martin spent the duration of his life in a world of change. Europe was caught between war and revolution. Politics, industry and opportunity were advancing like never before and this uncertain environment became a breeding ground for eccentricity, as evidenced by the vastly diverging paths of the Martin siblings: the eldest an inventor with a claim to the miners safety lamp, then came the soldier who fought at Waterloo, followed by the preacher tormented by madness, and finally, John, a landscape painter of biblical proportion.

Inspired by the expansive vistas of his youth, in particular his daily observation of miners endlessly funnelling between radiance and absence, Martin became best known for his painting of epic landscapes, religious subjects and fantastic compositions. His works stood apart due to their surreal colour schemes and apocalyptic scenery. Observing them now gives a glimpse into the mind of a young Northumbrian captivated by the power of the earth and the allure of what lay buried within, yet it wasn’t just the artwork that intrigued Adams.

 “It started in a roundabout sort of way. I was researching the invention of the miners safety lamp and how it affected the statistics of deaths in mines, so I went and compiled the statistics: lots of deaths in mines… the invention of the miners safety lamp…. deaths go up, like a rocket.

“You think to yourself ‘that can’t be right’ but I sniffed out a story and started to dig. It took me to Humphry Davy and George Stephenson and then I realised they connected with John Martin. I knew I was onto something interesting but I didn’t know quite what.

“As it turned out, John went to London in 1806, became very fashionable, and fell in with a group of like-minded people: Shelley, Turner, the Brunels, basically anyone you’ve ever heard of. Together they set in motion a sort of movement to change the world which, by roundabout circumstances, ultimately led to Karl Marx and the writing of the Communist Manifesto.

“For me it was a successful project because I sniffed out a very interesting story. It was a really good yarn, probably the best non-fiction book I’ve ever written, and it bombed. It was a publishing disaster. It made me no money at all, never sold out of its original print. The Prometheans was a Guardian book of the week, where it was described as ‘something new done dazzlingly’, and then nobody read it. Publishing is a weird game.”

The lack of success for The Prometheans left Adams at a bit of an impasse. Years of work had gone into a project that never repaid him, he was attempting to raise a young son, now without a partner, and was nearly penniless. In an effort to bring some stability to their lives he undertook a PGCE course, under the impression that teaching would provide some financial security, whilst also beginning his third project exploring the life of a neglected Northumbrian, this time King Oswald.

Oswald was Adams’ speciality, a tale of Dark Age heroism where his archaeological expertise could come to the fore; yet somehow his spiral of despair was not quite finished. Despite his archaeological savvy, captivating narration and the historical significance of Oswald himself, no one showed any interest in publishing the book, and if that wasn’t disheartening enough, landing a teaching job had also proved much tougher than expected. Unsure where to turn next, he began to formulate an idea.

“I had nowhere to live and no prospects. I had a child but no partner, no money, my parents had died. And I just thought ‘you know what, I might just take off’. I’d done quite a lot of pretty serious walking at that point, ‘I think I’ll just fuck off, you know, just put a rucksack on and fuck off’. And then I thought, if a person does that, just carries on walking, how do they walk? Physically, how do they walk?

“How would they talk? You know, I was just throwing some ideas around. Is there a language that you would use if you walked forever? I know a little about the language of landscape, I know how to write about landscape. But how do you create a relationship between someone who walks forever and their landscape? How do you think about that relationship? Then the voice came to me and I started to write.”

Up until this point in his literary career Adams had unintentionally carved out a niche for himself, that of the historical biographer, and, while that genre matched his academic background and professional skill set, it was not where his true ambitions lay.

 “What interests me is the relationship between human beings and their landscape. Landscape is much more proactive and sensual and reactive than most people understand. It’s doing things to you while you’re doing things to it and that, to me, is very interesting.

 “That’s why Northumbria interests me, it’s why history interests me, why archaeology and trees interest me, because I want to understand that relationship. Watching people behave in landscapes, whether it’s looking at a Brueghel painting, reading poetry, digging up a prehistoric henge monument or cutting up a tree, it’s all interesting. All of it. That’s what I consider my niche, people in their landscapes.”

It was through this passion that he developed the idea for his first novel, The Ambulist¹⁸. The man who walks forever. A symbol of his own need for escape but also a mechanism through which he could explore his own relationship with the now dominant landscape of his life, Northumberland.

“As you go through it, Northumberland constantly unfolds. There are other counties that do this, and other visually stunning counties, but Northumberland kind of gives itself to you. You get that odd glimpse of the sea and the clouds coming in at head height, the blueness of the hills. I like that it has a coast but it doesn’t feel squeezed in against it, and the fact that, although there’s an international border in there somewhere, you don’t notice it.

By this point Adams was now fully caught in Northumberland’s web, an unwitting captive to its imperious charm. The Londoner was gone. Replaced with a north eastern soul, a man who whittled away days in moors and valleys, searching, exploring and contemplating the meaning of an ancient language etched into rock.

“I like that there aren’t many people. That I can leave the front door and walk for 200 miles without going through a town very easily. I’m perfectly happy walking for a full day without meeting anybody, wild camping and then moving on the next, but I’m also happy to chat to people in the pub, on the road or with farmers on the trail.

“I love the idea that as you’re moving through that landscape, you’re kind of crossing into a new one. Really every day you’re in a different landscape, with different characteristics and new nooks and crannies to discover. They’re the really interesting bits. Little waterfalls, crags and bits at the back of things that people don’t really talk about very much. It’s got plenty of secrets, Northumberland. I’m pretty certain you could spend a whole lifetime here and you wouldn’t really know it. You can’t have been down every road or track or pathway, it’s just not possible. You’re never going to run out of it.”

 A never-ending, ever-changing landscape. What better place to explore for the eternal nomad? Or indeed, for a person obsessed with the language of landscape? It is a land littered with the runes of our ancient forebears and one that presents an unceasing supply of geoarchaeological study. Northumberland speaks directly to you, if you are willing to listen. Certainly – as with many who come to know the region – its ancient markings are of special significance to both Adams and his fictional wanderer, as evidenced by the following passage.

The stone from which the fortress had been forged so many centuries before was quarried from a line of hills that locals knew as the Fell Sands. They rose to the surface of the earth, secretive, among the corn fields of the coastal plain, and swelled steadily westwards in seductive undulations across oceans of moor and crag before crashing wave-like against the foot of the Cheviot massif. From the crest of this wave, the volcanic hills of the Border must have appeared to the earliest explorers of these blessed lands, the sunrise at their backs, as the plateaux on which heaven had been created by an Olympian of terrible love and creative power. His light poured in floodlit cataracts down canyons riven through onrushing head-height flocks of clouds onto a maiden land of perfect virgin green, voluptuous in form, bearing the promise of fertility and doom…

 At this transcendent place — at his very feet — the Ambulist’s predecessors had made their arcane mark on the land. Into the surface of the smooth bare rock some ancient sculptor had incised a pattern of rings and channels in low relief, so that the first and last light of the day should etch them in shadows which must fade at the sun’s full height and at dusk. To the Ambulist, present at this diurnal display as if by careless invitation, the pattern shimmered in and out of focus. He laid his bag down on the ground and knelt, feeling for the sense and magic in the carvings. His fingers traced the time-worn lines of this unearthly map, probing for some sense of its author’s esoteric purpose. Pale green, white and yellow freckles of lichen, nature’s own adornment, graced the figures. The wind caressed them as if it, too, sought to read their message; and as it did so it sang the faint refrain of a song as old as the hills themselves.

Not long after completing The Ambulist, the author’s fortunes started to turn. A newly-established publisher, Head of Zeus became interested in the Oswald biography and, following its initial publication in 2013 and, potentially, buoyed by the popularity of a well-known television series, The King in the North has sold well ever since. It was the lucky break that finally allowed Adams a level of professional stability, brought the commercial success to match his critical praise, and presented a viable future in writing.

Yet, it’s still The Ambulist, conceived at possibly his lowest ebb, that he feels most passionate about. The project that first prompted an inward reflection on what Adams considers his niche, the ever-developing relationship between himself and his adopted homeland.

“It’s the only book I’ve written that I can read and get any pleasure out of. I can’t read The King in the North or any of that. That’s work, it’s done. It’s on the shelf. I have to give talks about it, and most of it I can’t remember. But The Ambulist I do read. I’ll pick it up, leaf through a page and I can hear the characters still, it’s totally real.”

Full of winding, affectionate passages, at times it reads like an elegy, at others like free verse poetry, and often begs the question, what stirs the heart more than a sense of belonging? Of kinship between man and earth? Some spend a lifetime searching for that warmth.

A warmth that Max Adams stumbled into following an impulsive decision to buy a wood and, though most have a more conventional route, it is a warmth that many have felt in Northumberland; an unexpected sensation of homeliness found in the northern wilds. In many ways it is occult-like, this land, collecting those who wander, unwittingly, into its grasp. Yet, in this particular case, the origins of the relationship may not be so obscure.

“My mum was an amateur artist. She never sold anything, but she drew. Abstract things, mainly. We lived in a first floor flat in Twickenham, and she would sit in front of the telly and draw landscapes in pen or ink. She was from the Midlands originally, but that wasn’t what she drew. They weren’t real landscapes, they can’t have been. They were works of abstract art.

“A bit like a sort of patchwork quilt, they were clearly landscapes, with shape and form, and they spoke of people in the landscape and geology and topography and yet, they weren’t real. They were an abstracted idea that really could only have been produced by somebody sitting in a flat in a big city. Not a country dwellers landscape, but an idealist’s landscape. A dream effectively. My mother dreaming of what the countryside would be like and when I walk through the borders I see those landscapes. My mother was dreaming of Northumberland.”