Two+Tivolis

The Two Tivolis
Looking at these pictures of Mam and Dad with Viki, when she was a baby, takes back to me how small was my boyhood world in Ladysmith Road.

Here my mother is standing about half way down the back garden. Behind her is the plot at the end of the garden, which for most of my childhood was occupied by our air raid shelter.

The gate opens onto an alley way running along the backs of all the houses. The large building to the left is the stable of a coalyard.

My father is sitting on the patch of concrete that, apart from a small border on two sides, filled the remaining space. He put down the concrete after the War because he was fed up with having to keep the well-used threadbare patch of grass tidy. The back of the border was occupied with clumps of Michaelmas Daisies, Phlox and Golden Rod (there is a large clump behind the dustbin).

Gardening was the first creative thing I did in my life. The edges were my garden. I also began growing things indoors with carrot tops, mustard and cress, nasturtiums and sunflowers. Then I moved on to Woolworth’s threepenny perennials, such as Veronica and Sedums. I enjoyed to see my plants spilling over each other. I was also fascinated by the fact that gardens have a peculiar relationship with time. They exist in time and change with it. They also carry in them traces of nostalgia embedded in recollections of when and why certain projects were initiated.

It seems natural to me that children and gardens go together. And why not, with so much in the garden for young people to love and experiment with? There's the fun of playing in the dirt, the excitement of digging up buried treasure, and the fascination of observing creepy-crawly things at close range. There was also the excitement of doing experiments, like when I discovered a strange seedling growing on top of the air raid shelter. I enclosed it in the top half of a broken milk bottle an watched it grow into Shepherds Purse, just a weed but it was uncommon in our patch. Then there was the annual infestation of my Woolworth gooseberry bush with caterpillers of the saw fly. In the end I gave up trying,to control them and the bush became my annual caterpillar zoo. Late summer arrived with and the rare evening visit of a humming bird hawk moth, buzzing audibly to the heavily scented pink phlox. I suppose I had a natural curiosity for nature which was self-fuelled by our backyard and augmented by walks with my father along the lanes and footpaths that began half a mile away where Ladysmith Road ended and 'the country' began. As far as real gardens go, my experiences came from Grant Thorald Park, a mile or so away, which was close enough for a playground, People's Park, about 2 miles from home, but designed on a grand scale with an aviary, a lake and a hillside pavilion created from the spoil from the lake excavation, and Sydney Sussex, with a rose garden that you entered from beneath the jaw bones of a whale. My imagination was fuelled by //The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett//.

I began this reverie a few days ago when I was writing a blog about gardening as art. As a contrast to our backyard in Ladysmith Rd, I remembered another confrontation with gardens in the family's wartime visits to one of Grimsby's two music halls. Our favourite was called the Tivoli and its imposing foyer was dominated by a huge mural of what, at the time, I took to represent the castle where Cinderella went to live after she married her prince. The Tivoli you see was my special place of pantomime. It was only after the theare was destroyed by a direct hit from a German bomb that I discovered in my Arthur Mees Children's Encylopedia that there was a real Tivoli in Italy and it was world famous for its gardens.

This 17th century painting was probably the model for the jobbing decorators who embellished Grimsby's Tivoli in celebration of all things grand and theatrical. It took me much longer to fully appreciate the greater social and artistic impact of the original Tivoli. Who knows?, it may be that it was actually the Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen in 1843 that stimulated the proprietor to give its name to Grimsby’s music hall.

As a descendant of Rome’s Tivoli, the one in Copenhagen was Europe’s first theme park. Copenhagen’s legacy are the many theme parks that were opened in the late 1960s and the 1970s as family-operated “garden parks”. The relative low intensity of ride, show, food, and merchandise facilities in these European parks, compared with their American counterpart, has given them a softer, lower-key appeal. However, in recent years, several of these attractions have been altering their approach to embark on intensive reinvestment campaigns to add major rides, shows, and revenue-generating facilities. Two parks which have been particularly successful at making this transition are Alton Towers in England, and De Efteling in Holland, which, after major improvements, now attract up to 2.5 million visitors a year. In this perspective the modern theme park and the British music hall have much in common being vehicles for mass entertainment.

Anyway I prefer to return to the original Tivoli, which was actually the name of the village that Cardinal Ippolito d'Este partially destroyed to convert its Franciscan monastery into a place of metaphor and imagination. My Cinderella's palace fresco in Grimsby was the creation of Ippolito's architect, Pirro Ligorio. These two combined their passions for Classical antiquity and mythology to create a stage for people to contemplate the lives and loves of Gods, which were orchestrated in many themes of extraordinary complexity. Over the centuries, the Villa d'Este at Tivoli has maintained the role of a primary European muse, compelling painters, composers and writers to reinterpret what they have seen, heard and felt there. Scholars have written entire books about it and garden makers throughout the world have copied it endlessly, all the time exploring Tivoli's hidden symbolic meaning.

It is these deeper cultural meanings of gardens that I wish to explore from the personal perspective of a childhood dominated by the few square yards of open space of a terrace house named in commemoration of the 28th February 1900 in South Africa, when General Buller broke through the Boer positions. The inconsequential colonial town of Ladysmith was relieved with the valedictory message that sums up the Victorian era out of which Grimsby's Tivoli music hall came; //"Thank God we kept the flag flying".//

I am starting with the Villa d'Este because it still stands firmly in its time. The Renaissance lode stone was the 'spirit of the place'. It looks backwards to ideas of people nature in the Roman world that were derived from their conquest of Egypt, Villa d'Este looks forwards to the myths of Disneyland where, theme parks take historical events, environments, conditions and lifestyles and sanitize them while they synthesize them into a commercial enterprise. Bowdlerized and simplified, history and other realities are turned into neat pleasant commercial packages that can be swallowed in dainty morsels with very little "indigestion." The theme park 'Tivoli experience' is intended to certify a fanciful idealized vision of ourselves. They impose a corporate vision on most of humanity, offering a plateau of social conduct and cultural ecology for us all to emulate.

Another important influence on my childhood was Grimsby's Rialto cinema; but that's another story. Real history is messy, untidy, and unruly.

Villa d'Este