Come with me into the graveyard, all human life is here

Month: May 2025

Rosa, My Beloved Deux Chevaux

My first car was a Deux Chevaux, and it was love. It was a hasty purchase. I had taken my first teaching job in the Kent town of Ashford and rented a cottage in a village six miles away. There was no bus service. With days to go before term started, I handed over £50 to an American tourist on Crystal Palace Camp Site. He had been travelling around Europe, and when we first met, Rosa was adorned with several months’ worth of his washing.

I called her Rosa after Rosa Luxemburg and Rosa Parks. She had a 602cc engine, rectangular headlights with halogen globes, a gear stick which came horizontally out of the dashboard with a handle curving upwards, a canvas roll back sunroof, and four doors. Also, a selection of scratches, dents, and rips in her upholstery; Rosa had seen life.

André Citroën’s brief in 1948 had been to produce a low cost, low fuel consumption car with simplicity of maintenance. It was to be capable of transporting four people and 50kg of farm goods to market at 50km/hour. Given the lack of good, paved roads in France at the time, it was further suggested that the car should be able to cross a freshly ploughed field with a full basket of eggs on the passenger seat without breaking them.

The motoring journalist LJK Setright lauded

the most intelligent application of minimalism ever to succeed as a car,*

and described it as a vehicle of

remorseless rationality.**

Peter Elsworth was less complimentary asking,

Does it come with a can opener?***

My Rosa came with a left-hand drive, and she registered her velocity in kilometres. This, combined with some powerful rattles, gave a satisfying delusion of speed. Her stickers affirmed her commitment to saving the whales and advancing nuclear disarmament. We became part of a special club, tooting and waving to our fellow 2CVs and their drivers, whether peering through a wet windscreen behind furious wipers or exulting in the sunshine with the roof rolled down. And together we learned that braking on icy roads is not a clever idea.

We took a summer holiday in Brittany where Rosa indulged her Gallic temperament, regularly stopping without warning. She revelled in the attentions of her fellow countrymen whose national pride required them to huddle around her engine discussing her symptoms until they coaxed her into life again.

Rosa on holiday in Brittany

By the time we caught the ferry home she was running as smoothly as a Deux Chevaux can…provided she was given a push start. The deckhands on Brittany Ferries took this in their stride, and we rolled on and off the ferry in style. With markedly less charm the British customs officer demanded that her engine be switched off while he inspected the contents of her boot, but he backed down when advised that he too might find himself obliged to push.

After a couple of years in Kent, Rosa and I moved on to an eccentric girls’ boarding school then housed at New Wardour Castle in Wiltshire. The staff rivalled the girls for delinquent behaviour. After driving my head of department to the pub one evening, Rosa’s headlights failed on the return journey. My head of department had no intention of walking home. “Just drive very slowly,” he ordered, and producing a ridiculously small torch he hung out of the window attempting to shine it in our path as we inched along the narrow lanes.

When I bought my first flat in Bath, I had no need of Pickfords, I had only to load Rosa up three times and we had conveyed everything I owned to our new home.

Rosa and I outside our new home
Rosa’s insouciant disregard for double yellow lines sometimes caused problems

Rosa had always liked to park in front of a stately pile, and in Bath she was particularly partial to The Circus and The Royal Crescent. But she had not been young when we met, and now she was growing old. I had to keep a steak hammer in the glove compartment, for on cold mornings the key would not turn in the ignition until I hammered on the ignition box. Yet Rosa still smiled and preened when having watched this performance other motorists would come over to see if we needed help or the loan of “proper tools.”

Rosa always liked to park in front of a stately pile,
even when she had to share that space with others.
Rosa’s ultimate pleasure: parked in The Royal Crescent, on a yellow line with a nervous passenger

As the last MOT loomed, we both knew that it would be fatal. We were not surprised when the garage mechanic listed the reasons: rusting floor, failing brakes, bald tyres, dodgy electrics. My Rosa had come to the end of the road.

There have been other cars but only Rosa ever held my heart, and years later in Paris I made a special visit to Montparnasse Cemetery to thank André Citroën for the joy he gave me by producing the most magical little car ever.

Grave of André Citroën, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris

*LKJ Selright, Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car, Granta, p.173

**LKJ Selright, The Spirit of Motoring, Past, Present and Future, in The Daily Telegraph, December 27, 2003

***Peter Elsworth in The New York Times.

The Taj Mahal: The Most Beautiful Mausoleum in the World

It is always galling to be obliged to agree with any timeworn banality; galling but sometimes unavoidable, for it is impossible to deny that the Taj Mahal is the most beautiful mausoleum in the world, surpassing all others, defying hyperbole and meretricious adjectives.

Commissioned by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan when his wife Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to their fourteenth child in 1631, the Taj has accreted myths, usually with little substance. It is said to be a monument to a great love story, that Shah Jahan was inconsolable after the death of his wife, that he planned to build a Black Taj for himself on the other side of the Yamuna River linking the two mausoleums by a bridge. There are stories of him severing the heads and gouging the eyes of his architects and craftsmen once the building was complete to prevent the creation of a rival structure. Later when deposed by his son, Aurangzeb, and imprisoned in the Agra Fort, it is claimed that Shah Jahan spent his last years gazing intently at the Taj, and when his sight began to fail, he lay in bed contemplating its reflection in a diamond fixed to the wall.

Yet such is the mystique and allure of the Taj Mahal that it has no need of fabricated legends. It stands at the apotheosis of Mughal architecture, drawing on Timurid building styles inspirationally fused with the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. Its roots lie in the mausoleum of Timur (Tamerlane) in Samarkand. Gur-e- Amir, the Tomb of the King, was built in 1403 when Timur’s grandson and chosen heir died. It became the family crypt of the Timurid dynasty, later housing Timur himself, his sons, and other grandsons.

At the Gur-e- Amir complex a traditional Islamic iwan or gateway opens to a courtyard and a symmetrical mausoleum with a fluted azure dome. The gateway comprises a rectangular space walled on three sides and decorated with calligraphy and blue ceramic tiles bearing geometric designs. Within the eight-sided mausoleum blue tiles jostle with onyx and marble stalactites. A dark green jade cenotaph indicates the location of Timur’s tomb which lies in the crypt beneath.

The Gur-e-Amir has attracted its own improbable folktales, for inscriptions on Timur’s cenotaph read:

When I rise from the dead, the world shall tremble

 Whosoever disturbs my tomb will unleash an invader more terrible than I.

The Russian anthropologist Gerasimov opened the tomb in 1941… two days later the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Stalin allegedly believed the curse and had Timur’s body reburied with full Islamic burial rites…to be rewarded with the Soviet victory at Stalingrad.

Gateway to the mausoleum of Tamerlane
Symmetrical mausoleum seen across the courtyard
Fluted dome
Timur’s cenotaph, the tomb is in a crypt beneath
Decoration within the mausoleum
Decoration within the mausoleun

Timur was the progenitor of the Mughal dynasty, for Babur, the first Mughal Emperor (1483-1530) was descended from him on his father’s side. Babur inherited Fergana in eastern Uzbekistan and conquered Kabul and Samarkand, before moving on to India, taking Delhi and Agra. And it was the tomb built for Babur’s son, Humayun, which was the first great Mughal architectural masterpiece.

Humayun’s tomb in New Delhi, commissioned by his Persian wife and designed by Persian architects in 1562, introduced central Asian architecture to India. It was modelled on the Gur-e- Amir with the same traditional gateway, geometrical symmetry, central bulbous dome, arched alcoves, lattice stone screens, and a paradise garden. The enclosed garden, divided into quarters with a main axis of water, was the first garden tomb on the Indian subcontinent. But the mausoleum also drew on Indian devices with decorative chattri, and it was built using indigenous stone, with red sandstone facework, inlaid with bands of white marble. The builders embraced the hierarchical use of sandstone and marble representing the kshatriyas (warrior caste) and Brahmins (priest caste) respectively.

Entrance to Humayun’s tomb
Humayun’s tomb with dome and chattri
Courtyard gardens
The cenotaph, the tomb lies beneath

At Sikandra, the mausoleum of Akbar, (1605) the third Mughal ruler, exhibits the same synthesis of styles, combining a traditional Islamic gateway, Arabic calligraphy and lattice work, with the use red sandstone bearing white marble features, and with chattri topped minarets at each corner of the gateway.

Entrance gate to Akbar’s mausoleum. The symmetrical minarets topped with chattri
The mausoleum
The cenotaph
Decoration

The tomb of Mizra Ghiyas Beg, the Itmad-ud-Daulah, or Baby Taj, marks the transition between the first monumental phase of Mughal architecture, exemplified in the red sandstone and marble decoration of the Humayun and Akbar tombs, and the second phase of white marble buildings inlaid with delicate pietra dura detailing. Built by Nur Jehan, wife of Jehangir, the fourth Mughal Emperor, for her father in 1622, the Baby Taj is the first Mughal structure built completely of marble. It stands on a red sandstone plinth, its walls inlaid with polychromatic precious and semi-precious stones and perforated by jali screens with ornamental patterns. Octagonal minarets, topped by chattri, rise at each corner, maintaining perfect symmetry. Often described as a jewel box, it is acknowledged as the ultimate prototype and inspiration for the Taj.

Entrance gateway to Itmad-ud-Daulah
Itmad-ud-Daulah, the Baby Taj, white marble on sandstone plinth
Polychrome decoration
Flora decoration
Cenotaph

With the Taj Mahal, Indo-Islamic architecture reached its apogee. The Taj retains its Persian roots: the traditional gateway; the symmetry, balance and harmony of the mausoleum, with a white marble minaret at each corner, extending to the identical sandstone mosque and guest house which flank the central structure; the bulbous dome; and lattice windows. Behind a screen the false sarcophagi of Mumtaz and Shah Jahan, who was buried beside his wife three decades later, indicate the position of the burials in the tomb chamber below. In the only asymmetrical element, Shah Jahan’s cenotaph is larger than that of his wife, mounted on a taller base, and with a traditional pen box on top. But the translucent Indian white marble is now the dominant material, used for both the platform and the mausoleum. Both are inlaid with precious and semi-precious stones: jade, crystal, turquoise, lapis lazuli, sapphire, carnelian, coral, onyx. The skill and artistry of the Indian stonecutters, inlayers, and carvers have created exquisite flowers and patterns. Yet withal the complex is set around a Persian garden of paradise completing the perfect synthesis.

Gateway to Taj Mahal
TheTaj Mahal, perfect symmetry
Reflection
The dome
Decoration
Decoration
The cenotaphs are concealed behind a stone lattice
Dusk, from the opposite bank of the Yamuna River

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