ONE MORNING THIS past June, I played truant from a conference I was attending in Norwich, England, and called a taxi to take me out to the countryside. But the taxi was late, and I had to stand and wait awhile. When it finally arrived, shortly after nine, there was some confusion. Was this the taxi I had hired? Was I the person the driver had been sent to pick up? Had some other passenger, not yet waiting there at the circular drive at the heart of campus, called the dispatcher? We only had each other: I was going somewhere and he was prepared to take someone somewhere. I entered the car.
It was a gray morning, and visibility was poor. The high latitude and the date—it happened to be the summer solstice—meant the sun had been up since four-thirty, but fog persisted. I told the driver where I was going, and we drove in silence for a while through mild traffic and quiet streets, until the city began to thin out in the gray. And where exactly in Framingham Earl? the driver asked me. St. Andrew’s Church, I said, reciting what I had written down: near Poringland, just off the Yelverton Road. He knew it.
I looked out the window, watching the landscape slip by, the houses, the hedges, the fields and farms, the strange-looking bales of hay bound in black plastic, the road signs with their unfamiliar East Anglian names, the heavy, threatening trucks that barreled down the busier roads. The driver broke the silence and became talkative, flitting from one subject to another in a laconic but unceasing way, not really caring much whether I was listening or interested.
I like the area and I like traveling in it, he said. There are many airfields around here, not just in Norfolk but also Suffolk and many other parts of the country. It’s just something I do. I have a spare bit of time, yeah, I go down to an airfield, see an air show, or just visit a disused field, go down there, remember what it was like. Places like Greenham Common, down in Berkshire. You know about that, yeah? I said I didn’t, but he could see now that I was making some notes, that he had captured my interest. He forged ahead.
Greenham Common’s a major one. That’s where your CND camp was, yeah, the women’s peace camp, all that. Used to be cruise missiles and all sorts there through the eighties, until the nineties. I went down there, bit of runway left, but otherwise it’s all gone. And right around here, in Norfolk, with all the airfields and bases and what have you, this was called Little America during the war. Whole area was full of American air bases. During the war, the Second World War, mind you, bomb groups were based here and they used to go out on flying missions from here in the evenings. We are near the coast, and they’d take off from here to bomb the German cities, from here and from Suffolk, too.
There is someone who would have loved to talk to you about this, I said, perhaps not loud enough for him to hear, and, as I said it, there was a sudden catch in my throat. Only then did the driver introduce himself, turning back for a moment with his hand on the wheel, his blue eyes a little bulbous, but the palest and most guileless of blues, tending almost toward gray. My name’s Jason, he said. And, with the same laconic urgency as before, he continued talking. Bentwaters was another big Cold War air base, he said. That closed down in 1993, thereabouts, but many of the men just stayed here, you see. They’d been here so long, they were part of the life here, these American airmen. They married local girls. There’s a museum down there in Bentwaters, that’s in Suffolk, they’ve got some of the old airmen giving talks. Tell you what, I think the place belongs to a family now, they bought the airfield, if I’ve got that right. The Kemble family, it’s theirs now. There’s just the one plane flying from there now, a Spitfire, and it’s flown by a lady called Carolyn Grace. She’s nearing sixty now, but she still takes the plane out. Only lady that flies a Spitfire in this country, to the best of my knowledge. Strange to say, her Spitfire was flown in a mission over Normandy on the morning of the D Day landings. And there was another base in Woodbridge, close to the coast, and that one had an emergency landing field, with an airstrip three times your normal airstrip length. That’s for your planes coming in from missions, maybe in distress or something.
Jason talked, and we drove on, through small country roads that were like a postcard idea of rural England, winding, narrow, sedate roads, which, at sudden intervals, became larger roads, fierce, fast, and dangerous roads, which seemed to have barely enough space for the heavy traffic that plied them. On one of these larger roads, just as I noticed a sign for a village called Dunston, a large trailer rumbled past us at speed, and, whether from the shock of that overtaking vehicle, or because I had eaten nothing that morning, or perhaps due to some uneasiness brought about by Jason’s stories, I felt carsick for the first time in my life. And at that very moment, with a flickering photographic recall, as though someone had just switched on a slide projector, I remembered something W. G. Sebald had written. Looking it up now, I am surprised by how accurate my memory of it was, save for a few of the statistical details:
His thoughts constantly revolved around the bombing raids then being launched on Germany from the sixty-seven airfields that were established in East Anglia after 1940. People nowadays hardly have any idea of the scale of the operation, said Hazel. In the course of one thousand and nine days, the eighth air fleet alone used a billion gallons of fuel, dropped seven hundred and thirty-two thousand tons of bombs, and lost almost nine thousand aircraft and fifty thousand men. Every evening I watched the bomber squadrons heading out over Somerleyton, and night after night, before I went to sleep, I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.
Are you all right? Jason said, glancing at the rearview mirror. I had rested my forehead on the window at the back and bunched myself up on the seat. I must have looked terrible. I feel ill, I said. I think I’d like to get something to eat, is there a small shop nearby where we could stop? Jason said there was a place right ahead, just past the Poringland Road, and within a few minutes we pulled in near a busy intersection. I went into the shop to buy a banana and a bottle of apple juice. It was about a mile away from where we were, in Framingham Pigot, in December 2001, that Sebald had had a heart attack while driving his Peugeot. The car had crashed and Sebald had died instantly. His daughter, in the passenger seat, had been badly injured. As I thought about how close in space these events were, even though by now removed in time, I noticed from the backseat of the taxi the headlines of the Eastern Daily News, pasted in front of the shop: MAN JAILED FOR MURDER OF NORFOLK PENSIONER. It was another set of lives, another set of fates rising to the surface for a moment before falling into history.
Northwest of here is Swanton Morley, Jason said, when he saw that I had recovered somewhat, eager to resume his storytelling. I’ve been to that as well, there is another airfield there, they’ve got acrobatic displays. And just to tell you how a little bit of history opens things up, yeah, I noticed a small memorial when I was there, didn’t recognize the name. But just from the name of the airfield, I was able to go home and on the computer find out who that was, what happened to him, why there’s a memorial. With just a little bit of information your computer can tell you so much. Christopher Wilkins, that’s the name, he was flying in an air show, in 1998, when his engines stalled and he went down. And while Jason was telling me this, I remembered one of Sebald’s micropoems in Unrecounted:
On 8 May 1927
the pilots Nungesser & Coli
took off from Le Bourget
& after that
were never
seen again.
Jason said, as though he were commenting directly on my own silent thoughts: These people are worth remembering. It’s nice to think that people will want to remember the past, because it shapes who we are, at the end of the day. I try to remember, you know. I’ve even been to some airfields in Germany. Well—his tone changed, and he stopped the car, bringing me out of my reverie—here we are. St. Andrew’s Church. I’ll just wait out here for you.
It was a quiet, shaded lane. The fog had lifted, but the day was not bright. There was not a soul around. I raised the slim iron latch of the wooden gate, which was overgrown with creepers, and went around the old Norman church with its characteristic East Anglian round tower. Round-tower churches are rare in England now, except in Norfolk and Suffolk. St. Andrew’s is built of honey-colored stone, its churchyard full of old stones, old graves, well kept but arranged somewhat haphazardly. Flowers were in bloom all over, and there was in particular a profusion of foxgloves.
I searched. Finally, coming around the chancel, I saw Sebald’s gravestone: a slab of dark marble, a slender marker shaded by a large green bush. There he is, I thought. The teacher I never knew, the friend I met only posthumously. Some water had trickled down the face of the slab, making the “S” of his name temporarily invisible, as well as the second “4” in “1944” and the “1” in “2001.” The erasures put him into a peculiar timelessness. Along the top of the gravestone was a row of smooth small stones in different shades of brown and gray. There was a little space on the left. I picked up a stone from the ground and added it to the row. Then I knelt down.
How long was I there?
When I returned to the car, I asked Jason to drive me back to Norwich, to the Church of St. Peter Mancroft in the city center. Jason said: Just to satisfy my curiosity, this grave you came to see, he’s a writer, yeah? What’s his name, maybe I can find out more about him. I told him the name. He’d never heard it. He was a sort of local historian, I said, like you. Like you, he didn’t want the past to be forgotten, especially the small and neglected stories. He lived in this area a long time, taught literature up at the university. Jason turned around, and from under his glasses I could see both a merriment and a melancholy. He was originally from Germany, I said. Germany? he said. Well, that’s what you’d call ironic. And he wrote down the name.
At St. Peter Mancroft was the memorial to Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century physician and antiquarian whose weird and digressive texts Urn Burial and Religio Medici had meant much to me as a young would-be physician. I did not read Sebald until later, after I abandoned my medical studies. Only later still did I find out that he had been strongly influenced by Browne. That connection with Browne, and with others, like Nabokov and certain obscure historians of Northern Renaissance art, helped me to understand something of the uncanny feeling I had when I first read Sebald, and the feeling that I still have each time I read him: a feeling of return rather than of arrival.
That afternoon, thinking of Jason’s eyes and the slight mischief in his serious mien, I was faintly aware of others traveling the same circuits, pulled by an unidentifiable gravitational force into certain habits of mind and psyche. In The Rings of Saturn, Sebald had written:
Across what distances in time do the elective affinities and correspondences connect? How is it that one perceives oneself in another human being, or, if not oneself, then one’s own precursor?
I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the University of East Anglia, where he had taught for more than thirty years. A large magpie followed me around, disappearing for occasional spells, but always returning, a solitary bird, sharp black and white, bigger than I expected, and as starkly devoid of color as a woodcut. I am not superstitious, and thought nothing of it. But the bird was persistent. These things, as Sebald said in one of his last interviews, once you have seen them, have a habit of returning, and they want attention. He said this with regard to the interred past, but I think he possibly meant more.
Later, in the unending late afternoon of the longest day of the year, Sam, one of the conference organizers whom I had gotten to know that week, and who had come to Norwich just a few weeks before Sebald died, said—with no prompting from me—that it had been noticed at the university that Sebald always wore two watches, one on each wrist. Was it something to do with the mystical properties of different metals? Was it some strange sense of time that demanded simultaneous witness? Or was it simply Sebald’s dry sense of humor? And were the watches even set to the same time zone, or was one testifying to past time, the way his writing did? Sam didn’t know, but I found myself thinking again of the magpie, its talent for collecting this and that, and its eye for the sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary. I said good night to Sam and, returning to my hotel in the last light, well past nine, saw the bird again, going from bush to bush in the uphill path ahead of me, little more than a shadow now.