‘I JUST THINK SO MUCH OF LIFE is terribly terribly dull, don’t you, Alexander?’
‘I do indeed, Miriam. Terribly dull.’
‘And most people also, don’t you think?’ Here Miriam shot a glance in my direction.
‘Is it Nietzsche,’ said Alex, ‘who claims that most people who appear to be alive are in fact already dead, because they have never been awakened to the powers and possibilities of their own life, and the opportunities for thrill and pleasure?’
‘Sounds like Nietzsche,’ I said, though I had not, admittedly, at that time, ever read any actual Nietzsche. My German was not quite up to my Latin – which itself was not entirely up to scratch. But everything I had heard about Nietzsche, even then, did not endear him to me.
‘The human spirit yearns for thrill and pleasure,’ said Miriam, tossing her head back in what I imagined she imagined was a Dionysiac fashion.
‘Yes,’ agreed Alex, rather keenly.
‘Such a shame that not everyone is of the same opinion.’ At which Miriam shot me another withering glance, and I wished, not for the first or last time, that I had left them to their Nietzschean adventure alone.
We had parked at the side of the road, next to a large sign that announced that the caves were shut and that trespassers would be prosecuted. Miriam and Alex took no notice of the sign and continued in their flirtatious and confiding conversation.
I got out of the car and pointed at the sign. ‘Trespassers?’ I said, interrupting them. ‘Prosecuted?’
‘And?’ said Miriam defiantly, also getting out of the car.
Alex simply ignored me and started walking over towards a stile that led into a wood. I grabbed Miriam by the arm. I was determined this time not to waste my opportunity by prefacing my remarks.
‘He’s married,’ I said bluntly.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Who?’
‘Him,’ I said. ‘Alex. I met his wife this morning.’
‘And?’ said Miriam. ‘That affects me how, exactly?’
‘Well, don’t you think it’s … rather … foolhardy to go off with a married man to some caves when …’
‘When what?’
‘Did he tell you about …’
‘About what, Sefton?’
‘The incident.’
‘Oh, the accident?’ she said. ‘The poor boy in the car? Oh yes, yes, he told me all about that. Terribly sad, but the police are there already. It’s all being sorted. So.’ She folded her arms. ‘And?’ She cocked her head in her customary challenging fashion.
‘Well. It’s just … Doesn’t it seem like rather bad form to—’
‘Bad form? Sefton, you may be bound by considerations of what you consider to be “bad form” but some of us like to think we’re rather beyond such pettiness in human affairs. This is 1937, I think you’ll find, not 1837.’
‘Well, I hardly think the death of a child, in any age, at any time, could be considered a “pettiness”, could it?’ I said.
‘You’re merely being obtuse now, Sefton.’
‘Obtuse?’
‘Yes. Obtuse. And otiose. And obfuscatory.’ She was not Morley’s daughter for nothing. ‘Clearly I would place the highest value on human life – unlike you, perhaps? – but I hardly see in this instance what on earth this tragic accident has to do with anything. Except that you seem to be using it as an excuse to suggest that I’m some sort of woman of low morals who can’t be left alone for one moment with a married man.’
‘Of course that’s not what I’m suggesting’ – it was exactly what I was suggesting – ‘but—’
‘But nothing, Sefton. Married or not, Alex is a very charming and intelligent and witty companion. Unlike some people I could mention. You’re more than welcome to accompany us to take some of your pointless photographs for Father’s book, or you can stay here at the car. Frankly, it matters to me not one jot.’
At which point Alex conveniently returned to the car and – pretending not to hear our conversation – noisily pulled a couple of lanterns from the back seat.
‘So?’ he said. ‘Ready?’
‘Or iota,’ said Miriam, to me.
‘Mr Morley’s speech is at 3 p.m.,’ I cautioned.
‘We know,’ said Miriam.
‘We shan’t be long,’ said Alex.
‘Precisely,’ said Miriam.
‘The path is reasonably clear. As long as you don’t mind a little trespass.’
‘Sefton prefers to stick to the tried and tested routes, I think you’ll find,’ said Miriam. ‘But I am certainly interested in a little trespass,’ with which she defiantly took Alex’s arm and walked off with him in a purposeful fashion towards the path to the caves. Assisting Miriam over the stile, Alex glanced back in my direction with a blank, emotionless stare.
I followed after them.
The path through the wood was overgrown, but Alex swept all before him, kicking and thrashing away at brambles with a ferocious energy. After perhaps five minutes of hacking our way along the path the bracken gave way and we entered a gloomy clearing. There were birds high up above in the trees, and the rustling of creatures in the brambles all around, and another sign: this one featured a skull and crossbones and read simply, ‘Keep Out. Danger’.
‘It’s safe then?’ I asked.
‘Really, Sefton! I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been deterred by a few warning signs,’ said Miriam. ‘Having been in Spain.’
This remark caused Alex to smirk rather, and excited in me such a terrible bitterness that I decided to hang back a little further, and leave Miriam to her fate, whatever it might be. As if she somehow knew that she had been abandoned, she for the first time expressed some slight hesitation.
‘Are we in danger?’ she asked Alex.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘There’s an adit into the mine right here. The sign’s just a way of keeping people out.’
‘So it’s perfectly safe?’ I asked, from a distance.
‘It’s perfectly safe if you know what you’re doing,’ said Alex.
‘And you do?’
He did not reply.
He and Miriam stood at the entrance to the mine, an opening carved out of the rock and steadied with stout timbers and iron. Alex lit his lanterns.
‘We could share?’ he said, offering a lantern to me.
‘Sefton will be fine,’ said Miriam.
‘Now, Miriam, it is very dark in here,’ said Alex melodramatically. ‘Are you prepared to face total darkness?’
‘I am,’ said Miriam, her voice rather husky with fear.
‘Come on then, let’s get on with it,’ I said.
And we walked into the narrow passage.
‘Watch your footing,’ said Alex; to my surprise the ground sloped upwards as we entered. ‘We have to go up before we go down. For the purposes of drainage.’
For a moment there was light behind us, and then we slipped into the still, cool slurry dark of the caves at Beer.
An account of the caves can be found in The County Guides: Devon, wherein you can read all about the history of the quarries, which were first worked by the Romans, and which have supplied stone to the great cathedrals throughout England and beyond. You can read all about how the stone was quarried by hand, in vast blocks weighing four tons or more, and how it was then carted on horse-drawn wagons or by barges from Beer beach to its destination, sometimes involving journeys of hundreds or thousands of miles. You may read how the freshly quarried Beer stone is ideally suited to fine-detail carving, saturated as it is with water and with very few fossils, and how it has always been much prized by stonemasons. You may read how the stone is found in a thick twenty-foot seam running north to south below other chalk layers, and how on exposure to the air it dries a rich, thick, creamy white and becomes almost indestructible, enduring for centuries. You may read about the difference between chalk and limestone, and the history of rock formations in the British Isles.
You can read all this and still you would have no idea about the caves at Beer.
As far as my memory serves, they are like this.
I remember first the puddles of water – splashing through them, my shoes becoming soaked. And I remember the low passages – banging my head against solid rock.
‘Mind,’ said Alex. ‘The passages are rather low, but the chambers are only a hundred yards. I’m not taking you too fast, am I? Would you like me to go slower?’
‘No!’ said Miriam. ‘Not slower! Come on, Sefton, keep up.’
I remember shuffling forward, bent and wet-footed, with Alex and Miriam up ahead, the sound of them talking quietly between themselves, accompanied by the sharp sound of rocks crunching underfoot, so that the entire rhythm of our short journey was of murmurs, splashes and crunch.
‘Father would love this!’ said Miriam. ‘He’s a very enthusiastic mycologist, you know.’ She sounded nervous, I thought, as though speaking for reassurance.
The darkness deepened and all of the usual indicators of space and time seemed to disappear: there was nothing to orient us. When Alex spoke his voice came echoing as if from nowhere: it was difficult to identify the exact source of the sound. Without a human face or body to identify it, his voice seemed rimless and all-encompassing, like the voice of the place itself, speaking somehow from beyond life.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The caves at Beer.’ He held his lamp up high, illuminating his face, which – to my astonishment – seemed to glow, with a phosphorescent-like glow, orangey and yellow. It was most extraordinary: absurd and unbelievable, like a pantomime ghost, and yet also undoubtedly impressive and inexplicable. All the anger I had felt towards him seemed to have disappeared. There was no doubt that here, he was in charge, he was to be obeyed. Something brushed past my ear and I let out a gasp.
‘Bats,’ said Alex.
‘Bats?’ cried Miriam.
‘The caves are populated by greater and lesser horseshoe bats. They use the caves to hibernate. We shan’t be too troubled by them.’ His voice was full of reassurance. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and we followed him as he revealed a secret world to us.
It was almost as if we had stepped out of the darkness into a pale sunlit morning. The underground chamber we were standing in was glowing with light: immense, serene and profound. I put out my hand to touch the rough walls.
‘Well?’ said Alex.
‘It’s amazing!’ said Miriam, and for once I had to agree with her. It was the most extraordinary sight, as if the world had somehow been reversed.
‘Extraordinary is it not,’ said Alex, ‘that something so dark should yield such light?’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Miriam, entranced. In the lamplight her face seemed to be surrounded by a halo, her dark eyes glaring out at me.
‘Like a darkroom, Sefton, is it not?’ said Alex. He was right.
In the years that followed, in all my work with Morley on the County Guides, I spent many hours in darkrooms, sitting on a stool by the developing tanks, endlessly repeating the slow mechanical gestures that produced the miraculous development of an image. It took years for me to master all the equipment and the techniques of photography. Many of my early efforts were poor by any standards – the images ill-conceived and ill-staged, the execution poor. Sometimes I accidentally exposed entire rolls of film: most of Essex, for example, I recall, was wiped out in its entirety and I had to return to take more photographs. Half of Cumberland and most of Westmorland similarly went missing. I amassed more and more equipment: tripods, a light meter, various filters and shutter-release cables. And I bought more and more beautiful cameras. An AGFA 6x9. A Voigtlander. A Rolleiflex. But the most pleasurable part of the whole process remained the simplest and yet the strangest and most profound: the transformation of the negative from dark to light, and from light to dark. The taking of great photographs, I realised after many years, involved somehow capturing the very deepest parts of something, those depths where people and places are their very opposites, or their other selves, and eventually I came to understand that this paradox applied not only to my subjects but also to myself. When I pressed the shutter I was indeed capturing something, but that something was not them, out there: it was me, in here. The darkroom was the laboratory of my soul.
‘Yes,’ I said involuntarily to Alex. ‘It is like a darkroom. Thank you.’
‘No need to thank me,’ said Alex. ‘This place is a place of truth. It is a place of revelation. It is in places like this where we as humans truly begin and end. We live in a flicker of light, but the darkness was here yesterday and today, and will be for ever. The dark places of the earth are from where all good issues.’
This little speech, for all its rather strange and stagey qualities, seemed to me at that moment to be utterly truthful and profound. Words that I would have found ridiculous to have been uttered up above seemed somehow perfectly acceptable here. In a place where all the usual assumptions were reversed, perhaps anything was acceptable. Alex was simply making the darkness fathomable.
‘Now,’ he continued. ‘I must show you some of the other chambers. They say that there are chambers here that have not been visited since the time of the Romans.’
‘Perhaps we will discover one ourselves!’ said Miriam. ‘Something that no one has ever discovered before!’
‘Perhaps we shall,’ said Alex, ‘perhaps we shall.’
And so we pressed further and further on into the caves, through narrow low passages, discovering new aspects of darkness. There were rooms of light and rooms of darkness, but the chamber where everything happened I remember most clearly because of its smell: the caves throughout smelled curiously dry and clean, but this place had a stale, rank smell, mixed with something richer and darker, almost like sweat.
‘There,’ said Alex, raising his lantern. It was a small cave entirely filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of small, stinking, suffocating mushrooms, their pale flesh a horrible admonishment to the dark.
This time it was Miriam’s turn to gasp. It was like witnessing a forest of tiny grasping fingers and thumbs.
‘For centuries the locals have used the caves for the cultivation of mushrooms—’ began Alex.
‘They look like …’ interrupted Miriam, who was, for once, lost for words.
What they looked like were the dead, imploring, desperate and pleading.
It was like a scene out of one of my nightmares from Spain. We had come across a church, a beautiful small white chapel, and it was a cold, dark, wintry night, and we were seeking shelter, and the doors of the chapel were swinging open, and so we went inside and inside were women and children who appeared to have been starved to death. And then there were the men – their men? – piled up beside them, shot in the head, shot in the back. And one woman lay, emaciated, with a baby still suckling at her breast and her mouth was wide open, and her eyes squinting, as if she were looking up in joy or in amazement, perhaps at the expectant return of her husband, or at God, or justice, or at planes high up in the blue dark sky above, dropping bombs. And they lay there in the dust and the dirt, their fantastic poor whitedark skin shining in the night, and we lay down beside them, gathered together for warmth, and we drank and drank and swore vengeance. And we wreaked vengeance. An eye for an eye. And even now sometimes in my dreams I see the church and sometimes I even see Franco himself, parading across the vast dark mortuary plain of Cadiz towards us, screaming out his achievements, and us cowering in fear and destroying one another.
I was overcome with this terrible memory then, lost in the chambers and passages of time, sunk in the stench, and I have no idea how much time passed – it could have been a minute, it could have been an hour – before I realised that I’d lost Alex and I had lost Miriam and when I called out there came back only the echo of my own voice.
For a moment I stood perfectly still, my breathing shallow, and then I panicked and started to run, through the blank space, and through the darkness, yelling out. Spiders’ webs swept across my face, chastening my every move, and water splashed up around my ankles, and the faster I ran the closer I seemed to come towards the very darkest and furthest and earliest places of the world, and the very darkest and furthest and earliest places of my being. The air became warmer and thicker, my breathing slower and more sluggish until eventually it felt almost impossible to walk, and impossible to move. The darkness became all-powerful. Vast chaotic empty landscapes of nothing seemed to stretch out into the recesses of the gloom and it was impossible to tell whether I was standing in some vast chamber or on a narrow path above some yet deeper and darker depths. It was as though I had been utterly abandoned, on a river or on the ocean, cut off from all civilisation and all hope of rescue, and drifting away fast from everything I had ever known towards oblivion. As I stumbled through the caves and passages there were moments when my past loomed up inside me, in the shape of dreams and horrible flashes of memory – my parents and grandparents, floating towards me in the dusk, there to greet me and to warn me – and it was as if someone had removed the shutters on life and I was able to see inside myself and the world and its meaning for the first time. I felt as though the inner truth of things had been revealed. And the inner truth was darkness.
When I eventually emerged from the caves, panting and frantic, and made it back down the path towards the car, I found that it had gone. Miriam and Alex had left me behind. I looked at my watch. I had been lost for no more than fifteen minutes. But I felt utterly abandoned. I sat down by the side of the road, alone, and wept.