To The River

I WAS STAYING THAT NIGHT in a house called Copyhold Hollow, which was set beneath a towering wall of beeches. The garden was bursting with flowers – peonies, columbines and overblown roses that strewed their scent through the clear dark air. I didn’t sleep well, and as I lay on my truckle bed drifting in and out of dreams I thought I saw rivers I knew only from books turning like snakes through their shifting terrains. There was Eliot’s strong brown god; Joyce’s Liffey; the plum cake-smelling Thames of The Wind in the Willows; and the terrible river Alph of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

Territories overlaid each other, or floated weightless, free of any known geography. The rivers riddled through worlds both real and false; they welled up in springs and fountains and gave out on great bleak estuaries and marshes. They ran through Dickens, George Eliot and the Bible, carrying bodies and babies in baskets. There was the Say and the Floss, Conrad’s glittering black Congo, the swift trout courses of Hemingway and Maclean, Huck Finn’s Mississippi, and the Thames of The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf. Though they were nothing more than paper rivers, I felt almost drunk upon them, for they were the true sources of my own obsessive hydrophilia.

It was almost nine when I properly woke, and I stumbled down to breakfast in a daze, forking up sausages and gulping coffee as the house’s owner talked of Berwick church and the complex intermarriages of the Bloomsbury set. It was 23 June, Midsummer Eve, the date of Shakespeare’s topsy-turvy dream. The following Midsummer Day used to coincide with the solstice until, in 1752, the Julian calendar was exchanged for the Gregorian one and the two festivals drifted free. Midsummer Eve was one of those moments when the gap between worlds was said to grow thin. It was celebrated with bonfires and riotous dances, and was also the moment to pick fern seed, which conveys invisibility upon the bearer, being almost invisible itself.

I’d planned to leave before it got too hot, but by the time I’d finished the last scraps of bacon the sun was at eye-level and rising fast. There wouldn’t be much river today – briefly where it crossed Sloop Lane and again in the meadows by Sheffield Park. Tomorrow, the path would join it at Vuggles Farm and that would be that, all the way down through Lewes and into the marshland of the Brooks. Today, though, I would be walking mainly in woods, the remains of the great Andredesleage that had once stretched across three counties.

The first was on the way to Lindfield, where I’d run like a maniac the night before, spooked by the shadows that gathered with the dusk. Now it was quiet and blissfully cool, opening onto a golf course still slippery with dew. The path skimmed the edge of town, crossing the high street and sidling out through the churchyard into a field of mournful cows with pointed hipbones that poked like hangers through their grubby coats. The cows were hot already, clustering in a wavering patch of shade that wouldn’t last an hour.

There was no such shade on the path. I was in the full sun and the light had begun to play tricks with my eyes. Up by Hangman’s Acre the grasses on either side of the track were etched so clear they glittered. Straw had been scattered on the ground, and it seemed that my vision had become impossibly sharpened; that I could count every stalk in a glance, every head of wheat, each one of the multiple and quaking grasses that bent beneath my feet. The straw was golden without being clean. The light sheered straight off it, a wave of light that didn’t break but bounced straight back to the sky. At the corner of my eye the field flickered as if a hand were tweaking it, as if at any moment the whole trompe-l’œil might be snatched away, the painted corn on its backdrop of blue, though what that might reveal I didn’t like to think.

I sat against a fencepost and smeared myself with Factor 30. There was a breeze that smelt of dust and roses licking at the hedge, and little queasy flares kept exploding in the wheat. The state was an aura, triggered by the sun, the precursor to a migraine that more often than not fails to arrive. These shifts in vision, which sometimes manifest as falling petals or schools of swimming stars, have the odd side effect of making the world seem unstable, an illusion flung up out of walls of light.

One of the symptoms of Woolf’s mental illness was migraines, accompanied at the worst of times by hallucinations both auditory and visual. No doubt the experience of finding the evidence of her senses unreliable contributed to her impression of the world as insubstantial and in constant flux, composed of an ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’, an insight that permeates almost all of her books. Some of her characters, now I came to think of it, also suffered from disturbed or heightened vision, like poor Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, who walks reeling through Regent’s Park and sees a dog morph into a man, trees quicken into life and the dead approach him from between the park benches.

I didn’t see dogs change into men, but for the rest of the day my vision seemed untrustworthy, as if I’d been subject unwittingly to the same sort of visual enchantment that afflicts the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some of the mischief there is caused by the juice of love-in-idleness, Viola tricolor, which when painted on sleeping eyelids causes the recipient to fall in love with whatever they next see, be it lion, ape, or a buffoon with an ass’s head. But even those who escape anointing lose faith in the reliability of their sight. ‘Methinks I see these things with parted eye,’ cries a shaken Hermia, ‘When every thing seems double,’ and in reply Demetrius answers: ‘Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’ Perhaps it was the gift of the date, or the synaptic upheaval brought on by the sun, but all day long I felt periodically uncertain of the solidity of what I saw, as if I too walked through the slipping landscapes of a dream.

I escaped into Henfield Wood, though to reach it I had to walk through a hamlet of houses unstitched from the village and set back behind their own arcing drives. I kept seeing notices on telegraph posts offering a ‘substantial reward’ for a lost Siamese cat. It wasn’t until I passed the third that I realised the date was 8 September, almost a full year back. They added, those signs, to the sense of stopped or stoppered time that is anyway the knack of midsummer, the fulcrum of the year, when everything seems to brake for a moment before swinging through ripeness and into decay.

Oh, cheer up, I said to myself, but the lost cat bothered me. A wren in the wood kept calling chink chink chink? chink chink chink?, the final syllable given a querulous upward lift. The light was softer here, draining through ferns and hazel leaves in an overlapping fretwork of greenish scales. There’s something unnerving about a wood. It’s the entrance to a different world, subterranean or set aside. Henfield Wood wasn’t wild. It was intensely managed, the paths clearly marked, the wide ride carrying a swooping run of telegraph poles. I could hear children shrieking, and in the field at its border glossy mares and foals munched companionably on bales of hay delivered by a girl on a quad bike. The fences were in fine repair; the paddocks electrified. This was the south-east, parcelled and divided, immaculately tidy, every square yard accounted for. And yet, no matter how prettified it becomes, a wood retains in its shadows a glint of something less than tame.

I left the path and pushed my way into a grove of ash and scrubby oak. Something was walking about in the bracken, cracking twigs and stirring leaves. Yesterday, in Rivers Wood, I felt eyes upon me and spun around, expecting to startle a blackbird. A man was standing on the path. When I turned he ducked, and hunched into the ferns. There were two pheasant pens ahead, and the road just past them. Who had scared whom, I wondered now? I’m often frightened in a wood, in a way I’m not anywhere else in the world, except perhaps a multi-storey car park. It’s the fear of what might happen when there’s no one to see, when you’re caught in a maze no less entrapping for being built of trees than concrete.

I’d been thinking that morning of The Wind in the Willows, and it struck me then that if it had nurtured my love of rivers it might also be responsible for this faint mistrust of woods, for I came to it in such a way that it was impressed indelibly upon my mind. My father left when I was four, and every other weekend he drove up from London to take us to his house. The soundtracks to these journeys were story tapes – The Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Three Men in a Boat, A Tale of Two Cities – and of them all our favourite was The Wind in the Willows. We lived then in theThamesValley, not far from where Kenneth Grahame himself grew up, and the locations, though unnamed, were instantly recognisable. My sister and I listened to that tape so often it became part of our code, turning up in birthday cards and long-standing family jokes. We liked to recite the mantra cold chicken cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad french rolls cress sandwiches potted meat ginger beer lemonade soda water, and to replicate it as greedily as possible in our own Thames-side picnics.

One autumn in the early 1980s we were coming home in a storm, and somewhere along the way the car ran out of petrol. It was raining hard and I suppose my father felt he had no choice but to lock the doors and leave us there, with the keys in the ignition and the tape still whirring on. It wasn’t dark but rain was blotting out the windows, and through the streamy glass the world seemed very distant. When we broke down the Toad had just encountered his first motor car, and after his wild raptures the story shifted key. It was a cold still afternoon, the narrator said, and the Mole had gone out walking. The winter air must have intoxicated him, for in one of those moods of recklessness to which he was prone he decided to visit the Wild Wood, though he’d been warned about it long ago.

My sister and I looked at each other uneasily. At first the wood seemed pleasurably spooky, and it was only when the light began to drain away that the Mole noticed something peering at him from a hole. Could it be a face? He looked hard. No. But then there was another, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them, evil wedge-shaped faces with hard staring eyes. Then to the faces was added a flurry of whistles, and then a patter of feet that increased in time to an almighty hail, as if something – someone? – was being relentlessly pursued. The Mole began to run too, pell-mell, his breath ragged, his legs pounding, until at last he almost fell into the hollow of a great beech tree and there took refuge beneath a pile of dead leaves.

My father returned at that moment, fortuitously enough, driven by a stranger and clutching a billycan of petrol. The Mole – we waited breathlessly – was also safe. Rat had come to find him, armed with a cudgel, and the pair of them had stumbled across Badger’s den as the woods subsided into snow. No harm was done. No one had been bludgeoned to death by a weasel; we were still intact in the back seat. And yet this incident confirmed in me a creeping sense that the world was not always as pleasant as it seemed, so that when I heard the story of Kenneth Grahame himself, I cannot say I was wholly surprised at how dark it turned out to be.

Kenneth was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and spent his early years in Argyll, where his father was the Sheriff-Substitute. He lost a lot of things early on – a mother, a father, his home – and though his mother’s death was caused by scarlet fever the rest were the result of drink. Cunningham Grahame was an alcoholic: a secret and morbid drunk of the kind that can wreck a family, not through violence or malice but by failing to prevent it from slipping into chaos. After his wife’s death Cunningham’s drinking was no longer under his control, and it became apparent to the more sober members of the family that the four bereaved children would need to be transplanted into a different home.

The one chosen for them was The Mount in Cookham Dean, a little Berkshire village a mile from the Thames. The Mount belonged to Kenneth’s maternal grandmother and was, according to his own account, a boundless paradise of orchards, fir woods, ponds and streams, populated by bandits, robbers and pirates with pistols! This period – low in adult intervention, rich in imaginative play – sustained Kenneth deeply and though it wouldn’t last two years it lived on as a lost Arcadia that fed all his later work. He drew on Cookham Dean repeatedly in the dreamy, nostalgic stories that made him famous, and he returned to the river in his final book: the tale of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad.

The Mount and its magical gardens were sold in 1866 and at around the same time Cunningham offered to take all four of his children back. A year later, he threw in the towel and bolted, abandoning his house, resigning his job and travelling to France, where he would spend the rest of his life in a cheap boarding house in Le Havre. The children returned to their grandmother, who’d by now moved to a cottage not far from Cookham Dean, and in 1868 Kenneth was sent away to school, the fees paid by an uncle. The traumatic effects of this triad of events, so closely bound in time, can be gauged in his inability to remember anything particularly after the age of seven. With the loss of The Mount and his father his childhood was in all real senses at an end.

Boarding school teaches boys to conceal their feelings and hide their private selves so deeply that it’s sometimes impossible to access them again. Kenneth managed the trick of self-disappearance well enough. He had, after all, long been accustomed to hiding his secret world from adults, those Olympians whose stereotyped and senseless habits he liked to mock in later stories. The problem was that this hidden self failed to mature; that Kenneth, put simply, never quite grew up. The concealed boy remained undeveloped within him, and though this meant he possessed an unusually acute sense of how a child thinks and feels, it also left him peculiarly unsuited to the life he was required to lead.

What Kenneth wanted was to attend Oxford University, a place that he conflated almost with fairyland and from which he felt painfully debarred. In an essay published posthumously he wrote touchingly of this sense of exclusion:

But those great and lofty double gates, sternly barred and never open invitingly, what could they portend? I wondered. It was only slowly and much later that I began to understand that they were strictly emblematical and intended to convey a lesson. Among the blend of qualities that go to make up the charm of collegiate life, there was then more of a touch of (shall I say?) exclusiveness and arrogance. No one thought the worse of it on that account: still its presence was felt, and the gates stood to typify it. Of course, one would not dream of suggesting that the arrogance may still be there. But the gates remain.

There is an unmistakable echo of these lines in the work of Virginia Woolf. She never went to school, let alone university, and in A Room of One’s Own she writes with a mixture of longing and irony of a visit she made to Cambridge, where she was repeatedly shut out or sent away on account of her sex, for ladies may not walk on college turf and ‘are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction’. Her lack of formal education left her with a lifelong sense – sometimes oppressive, sometimes liberating – of being an outsider, and this in turn provoked a diary entry that I suspect Kenneth would have appreciated: ‘Insiders write a colourless English. They are turned out by the University machine. I respect them . . . They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.’

Instead of being allowed to try for Oxford, Kenneth was ordered by one of the hated uncles who controlled the children’s finances to take a job in the City. He served an apprenticeship in the family firm and on New Year’s Day 1879 started as a clerk in the Bank of England. In the late nineteenth century the Bank was, by all accounts, an exceedingly eccentric place. According to Alison Prince, Grahame’s most recent biographer, it wasn’t unusual to come across a clerk in the lavatory butchering the carcass of a sheep bought wholesale in the local market. The lavatories were also used for dogfights, which were so much a part of Bank culture that some of the rougher clerks kept fighting dogs chained in readiness at their desks. Drunkenness was rife, hours were short, and behaviour in general seems to have been every bit as louche and riotous as that of today’s hedge fund managers and currency traders.

One might have expected such a sensitive young man to flail in this environment, but Grahame had been to public school and was accustomed to roaring boys. He kept his head down, drifted up the hierarchy, and in his free time began to write. His early pieces seem sentimental now, but they appealed to the Victorian obsession with innocence and were increasingly rapturously received. He wrote about nature, about wanderers and wayfarers, about pig-headed uncles and men who abandoned the strife of the city to wander footloose through the sleepy valley of the Thames. There are altogether too many Autumns being carried forth in russet winding-sheets for contemporary tastes, but over time these affectations declined. As Grahame began to document the world of his own childhood his writing became more simple and intense. The Golden Age, his second collection of stories, was almost entirely autobiographical and it appealed so deeply to readers of the time that he became famous almost overnight.

As the century drew to a close, two things changed in Grahame’s life. He was appointed Secretary of the Bank of England and he met Elspeth Thomson, the woman who would become his wife. In 1897 she was thirty-five; a strangely fey orphan who despite her girlish manner ran her stepfather’s house with considerable efficiency. Kenneth was frequently ill during this period, and much of the courtship was carried out by letter from the various haunts in which he was convalescing. Of what appears to have been a torrent of correspondence only one of Elspeth’s letters has survived, but there are hundreds from Kenneth, almost all written in a baby language that is as difficult to decode as it is maddening to read.

‘Darling Minkie,’ an early specimen begins: ‘Ope youre makin steddy progress beginning ter think of oppin outer your nest & facing a short fly round.’ Another, unusually romantic, example ends: ‘I’m agoin’ ter be pashnt my pet & go on dreemin a you till youre a solid reality to the arms of im oo the world corls your luvin Dino.’ Marriage proposals, wedding plans and negotiations around living arrangements were all carried out in this nursery prattle, which allowed both participants to play at being children adrift in a mystifyingly adult world. The sweet talk also served to conceal for a time the glaring differences between the two participants, for Dino had no real interest in intimacy, preferring boats and rivers to human company, while Minkie was scarcely educated and burdened with limitless romantic expectations.

Despite the violent objections of Elspeth’s stepfather and the dismay of Kenneth’s family, friends and even housekeeper, the marriage went ahead. The bride drifted up the aisle dressed like a self-conscious sprite in dew-damp muslin, a chain of daisies strung wiltingly around her neck. The honeymoon was spent in Cornwall, where Kenneth proved himself deeply unsuited to the solid reality of a wife by disappearing on solitary boating excursions at every available opportunity. Back in London, the benign neglect continued, much to Elspeth’s distress. Nonetheless, she managed to become pregnant and at the turn of the century the Grahame’s only child, Alistair, was born.

The tragedy of Kenneth Grahame’s obsession with childhood is encapsulated in the purblind figure of his son, who he swiftly skewered with the diminutive Mouse. If Kenneth never quite grew up emotionally, Mouse would refuse the sordid business of adulthood altogether, and his story can be read as one of the more distressing examples of that strange region in literary history which deals with the real children who inspire or are otherwise caught up in classic books, from Christopher Robin to Alice Liddell and the Lost Boys of J.M. Barrie.

Mouse was born blind in one eye and with a painful-looking squint in the other. From the start he was an unusual child and his parents became convinced that he was a genius, though he was prone to wild tantrums and had an unpleasant habit of attacking servants and stray children in the street, a tendency Kenneth found amusing and did little to discourage. The Wind in the Willows started life as a way of entertaining Mouse, who according to the custom of the time was brought up largely by servants and spent frequent holidays away from his parents. It began, as Kenneth explained in a note to Elspeth, as a bedtime ‘tory in which a mole, a beever a badjer & a water-rat was characters’ – the baby talk was evidently surviving the couple’s growing separation – and was developed further via letters. The tory was initially a very private business and it was only much later that Kenneth was persuaded it might be fattened into a book. During the writing process he inserted the more mystical elements, including ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’, that strange and wistful chapter in which a lost otter cub is discovered, in a moment of rapturous pantheism, at the feet of the Horned God himself. The resultant blend of childish romp and distinctly pagan nature worship confused early reviewers, but the clarity and humour of Grahame’s writing has proved unusually resistant to the attritions of time and his riparian world remains beguiling a century after it was first confined to print.

The character of Toad, that hapless blusterer, is said to owe a great deal to Alistair, but while Toad’s wildness was given firm limits by his faithful friends Rat and Mole, Mouse was alternately spoiled and ignored. After the years of alternate coddling and solitude, public school came as a terrible shock. Mouse seems to have had a rough time of it at Rugby, leaving after only six weeks, while a brief stint at Eton precipitated a nervous breakdown. Contrary to his parents’ fantasies, the boy was neither especially academic nor easy with his fellows, though his letters possess a pleasantly cocky charm and he looks attractively built in the few surviving photographs. In the end he was packed off to a private tutor, where he managed to disport himself with sufficient success that his father, after some string-pulling, won him a place at Christ Church, one of Oxford’s larger and more prestigious colleges.

Oxford had been Kenneth’s dream, but Mouse foundered there from the start. He couldn’t keep up with the work, botched his exams and failed to make friends among the other undergraduates. At last, in May 1920, he walked one evening from his college to Port Meadow, a pretty 400-acre area of grazing land bordered by the Isis, the young Thames, the same river his father had immortalised in his famous book. Oddly enough, another great work of children’s literature, Alice in Wonderland, had its origins in Port Meadow. Decades before Mouse took his walk, the Reverend Charles Dodgson, who is better known as Lewis Carroll, rowed up the river there one July afternoon with the three young Liddell sisters, who persuaded him to make up a tale about a strange world beneath the ground. Mouse, whose private childhood story had also been parcelled up and sold off to the public, walked through the meadowsweet and buttercups to the railway track, lay down across it with his head over the line and at some point before dawn was decapitated by a train. The verdict at the inquest was accidental death, but the coroner’s report leaves very little doubt that Mouse had taken his own life.

In the wake of Alistair’s death the Grahames left the rural farmhouse they’d inhabited for years, sold off most of their possessions, including the vast collection of toys Kenneth had lovingly collected, and ran away to Rome. They spent the next decade drifting around Europe and didn’t return permanently to the heartland of the Thames until 1930. Two years after his homecoming Kenneth died of a brain haemorrhage in their cottage by the river, and was buried in a grave lined with so many thousands of sweet peas that the air was steeped with their elusive scent.

Later his body was disinterred and shifted to Holywell in Oxford, where Alistair was also buried. I’d visited this place with Matthew, quite by chance, a few years back. The graveyard was half-wild, the grass uncut, and beneath a lilac bush we came across a sleeping fox curled nose to tail in the shade. Kenneth was buried there beside his son and on the front of their joint headstone was carved: To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alistair, who passed the river on 6^th of July 1932, leaving childhood & literature through him the more blest for all time.

That spring I’d been reading The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt, which is set at the beginning of the last century, during the great flowering of Edwardian culture and art. The novel is populated by all sorts of children’s authors, among them J.M. Barrie and Grahame himself, and it exposes the inadvertent, almost collateral, damage they seemed compelled to cause by dint of their obsessive interest in the young. Among the cast is a fictional writer, Olive Wellwood, who spins an ongoing private story for each of her own children. All of them find their stories subtly oppressive, but one, Tom, is destroyed by his, and I thought he might stand in some way as a tribute to Alistair Grahame.

Tom is a wild boy, happiest in the woods, and he is maimed by the entrapping experience of being sent away to school. ‘His’ story involves a boy whose shadow is stolen and who must pass into fairyland to claim it back. When his mother later turns it into a popular play he feels unbearably exposed and sets out on a long maddened walk from London to Kent, where he reaches the sea at Dungeness, waits for the sun to go down, and then walks into the waves. ‘He had sensed,’ Byatt writes at some point in this troubled, troubling story, ‘that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up.’ It is impossible to know whether this was what Mouse intended, but as an epitaph for Kenneth Grahame it seems uncannily precise.

I was recalled to the world abruptly then. I’d been walking up a long, sloping ride and as I turned a corner a golden dog and what looked like a deerhound came racing down the path. I must have jumped, for the man who followed them greeted me kindly, observing, You were walking in a dream and then these dogs came from nowhere, which added to the suspicion that I might have been talking out loud.

I’d come clean through the woods, and I found myself now in a snaggle of private lanes between beautiful old houses. It was a hidden world of a different sort, the spell cast this time by money. The houses – Pegden, Pilstyes, Little Grebe – were set back behind curling drives, the gardens edged by box the everlasting and rusty stands of beech. Fragments of conversation lifted over the hedges, accompanied by the sound of lawnmowers and running taps. I could see beds and borders through gates; attic rooms and gables; eaves and chimneypots.

According to the map there was a pub a mile or two further on, down in the valley where the river crossed Sloop Lane. The houses gave way to a plateau of horse pastures and fields of blue-furled wheat, the Weald spread out far beneath. It was the last high ground I’d cross, 230 feet above sea level, and I stopped at the top of the ridge to photograph my shadow pinned against the buttercups, startling four horses into a circling canter as the shutter clicked. At the bottom of the hill there was a hornbeam grove, the trunks hard and carved as bone, unbranching to the sky. Someone had been building jumps out of fallen logs, the sort of scruffy brush and bale affairs that a friend and I used to spend whole summers bodging together in Southleigh Forest, which now I stopped to think about it must also be a remnant of the Andredesleage. And then, Lord have mercy, there was the pub, and ginger beer and a plate of ham and mustard sandwiches that I wolfed right down to the crust.

The heat had not abated. Oh, you never help, an old woman with a dog said to her husband. The barman wouldn’t fill my water bottle, but gave me complicated directions to a standpipe in the yard. Just down the lane by the old mill the Ouse was running milky in the shadows and brown as beer in the sunlight, almost silent where it used to clap and twist. I stood on the bridge and peered down into it, riffling shallowly beneath the willows. There was a line from Grahame’s book that caught it. ‘The river still chattered on . . . a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.’

There was one last wood to cross before I’d join it, down on the once vast estate of Sheffield Park, which Henry VIII stole from the Duke of Norfolk and Bloody Queen Mary gave back. As soon as I entered Wapsbourne Wood, I could hear a nagging whine that I thought at first was a chainsaw, and then a choir of flies. There were signs nailed to the trees explaining the environmental benefits of coppicing, but the scene I came upon was on a far grander scale than any coppice I’d ever seen. The wood was mainly chestnut, and for an acre or more each one had been slashed a foot from the ground, aslant so they wouldn’t rot. Huge spindly oaks and hollies stood like masts amid the wreckage. The brush was piled here and there into heaps, though whether to mulch or be hauled away I couldn’t tell. Coppicing produces a variety of habitats on which many plants and animals now depend, the sign read. It was true enough. The foxgloves grew in profusion, as rosebay willowherb will grow where bombs have fallen or fires burned, rising in quick flames across the spoiled ground.

It was very still. Tyre tracks had wrenched the mud into waves, and over them the soft ripples of birdsong passed back and forth. Sometimes the lone walker feels that he is moving backwards in time, and sometimes that he stands at the threshold of a different world, though whether it is heaven or hell is anybody’s guess. The landscape hasn’t changed, not in any way that can be articulated, but a sense of strangeness seeps up from all around. At other times, it is what has been done to a landscape that curdles it, so it becomes a place in which one does not like to linger, for fear of something that cannot be expressed.

I had a dream as a child that I was going to hell. Judging from the bedroom in which I woke, pooled in sweat, I must have been six. We had just moved house for the fourth time and I was in my second year at the convent that had once, girls used to say, been the home of Hanging Judge Jeffries, whose bloody Assizes were notorious for their brutality. In the summer holidays the nuns used to come to our house to pick the grapes for their communion wine, and it seemed they’d picked also the lock to my dreams.

A child raised Catholic knows the world is not all it seems; knows that other realms exist above the clouds or thousands of miles beneath the floor. Though these beliefs may in their detail be discarded, the sense remains: that the earth is porous; that the eyes are not to be trusted. Flimsy, that’s how I was taught the earth is, straw-walled, so that one good huff will bring it down. The books I read as a child didn’t help. They were obsessed with Neverlands and Narnias, places reached by rabbit holes or wardrobes, by lingering near woods and rivers or plunging through a mirror. The notion of a world within our world, set deep, a world that can be entered only with difficulty by mortals, is not of course the sole possession of Catholicism, and nor does it belong exclusively to those escapist stories that Kenneth Grahame and his ilk used to spin in the innocent endless days before the First World War. There are older sources for these ideas, and in that spoiled wood they seemed very near.

The word hell comes from the Anglo-Saxon helan, meaning to hide; it is related to hole and hollow. Hel, the afterlife of the Norse, was a concealed place, as the land of the dead by its nature must be. Its analogy for the Greeks was Hades – which itself means unseen – and for the Romans Dis. Nor were these realms always freighted with connotations of punishment and damnation. The older hells seem closer to vast waiting rooms where the dead, unsleeping, bide their time.

Whatever names they go by, these places weren’t often visited by the living. Perhaps six or seven mortals made the journey to the underworld in classical mythology. Aeneas, the founder of Rome, went to visit his dead father, descending through the entrance in the marsh of Cumea. Odysseus, slick Odysseus, went only to the brink, sailing to the edge of Persephone’s realm and summoning the dead to visit him by the banks of the river Acheron. He wanted blind Tiresias to guide him home to Ithaca but the ghosts of heroes also came, drawn by the blood he poured, and he saw among them the hunter Orion driving a crowd of all the wild beasts he’d ever slain. Orpheus went down to reclaim Eurydice, who’d been bitten by a snake, and Hercules to steal the dog Cerberus, who guarded the gates to Hades. And then there was Psyche, who in order to win back her lover Eros had to carry out three tasks, the third of which was to bring home in a box some of the beauty of Proserpine, queen of the underworld.

The translation of this last story by Robert Graves offers helpful advice for finding one’s way into Hades, which is linked to the mortal realm by means of all sorts of riddling tunnels and shafts:

The famous Greek city of Lacedaemon is not far from here. Go there at once and ask to be directed to Taenarus, which is rather an out-of-the-way place to find. It’s on a peninsula to the south. Once you get there you’ll find one of the ventilation holes of the Underworld. Put your head through and you’ll see a road running downhill, but there’ll be no traffic on it. Climb through at once and the road will lead you straight to Pluto’s palace. But don’t forget to take with you two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water, one in each hand, and two coins in your mouth.

The two pieces of barley bread soaked in honey water are sops for the dog Cerberus. Psyche is also told to refuse all offers of food except a piece of common bread, for eating in the underworld means you must never leave. It was this taboo that entrapped Prosperpine, whom the Greeks called Persephone or Kore. After being abducted by Hades – for the king is named after his realm – she ate three pomegranate seeds – but some say it was four and some five or six – and though she was allowed to return to the earth’s surface for the summer months, in winter she had to return as Hades’s consort. The high goddess Persephone, Odysseus called her, the Iron Queen.

These were stories from far away and very long ago. But our native folklore is full of odd echoes that suggest familiarity with the maps and mores of Hades, as if those ventilation shafts reached up through the caves and barrows of these damper islands too. There are thousands upon thousands of local ballads and tales that tell of the fair folk that lived under the hills, in the cold stone palaces they’d hived away like bees.

One such is Cherry of Zennor, which I first came across in a collection of essays by the poet Edward Thomas, who’d found it in Popular Romances of the West of England, a book of folktales collected by Robert Hunt in the mid-nineteenth century. Cherry of Zennor grew up in Cornwall, and at the age of sixteen she left her family to go into service and see something of life. After a day’s walking she reached the crossroads on the Lady Downs, which marked the limits of the world she knew. She plumped herself down on a stone by the roadside and, putting her head into her hands, began to sob with homesickness. When she dried her eyes she was surprised to see a gentleman coming towards her, for no one had been on the Downs before.

When he heard what she was about the gentleman told Cherry all sorts of things. He said he’d been recently widowed, and that he had one dear little boy. He lived but a short way off, down in the low countries, and if she went with him she’d have nothing to do but milk the cow and look after the baby. Cherry didn’t understand everything he said, for he spoke in a flowery way, but she decided to take the job.

They went together down a long sloping lane shaded with trees, so that the sun was barely visible. At length they came to a stream of clear dark water that ran across the road. Cherry didn’t know how she’d ford this brook, but the gentleman slipped an arm about her waist and scooped her up, so she wouldn’t wet her feet. After descending a little further, they reached his garden gate. A boy came running to meet them. He seemed about two or three, but there was a singular look about him and his eyes were very bright.

Her job was to rise at dawn and take the boy to a spring in the garden, wash him, and anoint his eyes with ointment. She was not, on any account, to touch her own eyes with it. Then Cherry was to call the cow and, having filled the bucket with milk, to draw a bowlful for the boy’s breakfast. After her ordinary work was done, the gentleman required Cherry to help him in the garden, picking the apples and pears and weeding the leeks and onions. Cherry and her master got on famously, and whenever she finished weeding a bed, her master would kiss her to show her how pleased he was. Cherry had everything the heart could desire, yet she wasn’t entirely happy. She’d decided it was the ointment that made the little boy’s eyes so bright, and she often thought he saw more than she did.

One morning she sent the boy to gather flowers in the garden, and taking a crumb of ointment, she put it in her eye. How it burned! She ran to the stream to wash away the smarting and there she saw at the bottom of the water hundreds of little people dancing, and there was her master, as small as the others, dancing with them and kissing the ladies as they passed. The master never showed himself above the water all day but at night he rode up to the house like the handsome gentleman she’d seen before.

The next day, he remained at home to pick fruit. Cherry was to help him, and when, as usual, he looked to kiss her, she slapped his face, and told him to kiss the little people with whom he’d danced under the stream. So he knew she’d taken the ointment. With much sorrow he told her she’d have to leave. He made her a bundle of fine clothes and then led her for miles on miles, all the time uphill, going through lanes and passageways. When they came at last to level ground, it was near daybreak. The gentleman kissed Cherry and said that if she behaved well, he would come sometimes to the Lady Downs to see her. Saying that, he turned away. The sun rose, and there was Cherry alone on a granite stone, without a soul to be seen for miles. She cried until she was tired, and then she went home to Trereen, where they thought she was her own ghost returned.

I didn’t know how old this story was, but some of its elements – the fairy ointment, the land beneath the ground – seemed familiar. The development of folk tales is much like that of roses; stories may be hybridised or grafted or pop up as sports far from their native place. Cherry’s ointment is a distant cousin of the juice Puck smears across the sleepers’ eyelids in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and I thought the story’s topology might have sprung from Tom the Rhymer, the classic underworld story, which goes back at least as far as the thirteenth century and is probably far older.

Tom the Rhymer, who is sometimes called True Thomas or elsewhere Tam Lin, met the Queen of Elfland on Huntlie Banks and was taken by her to her own land far beneath the soil, from where he returned many years later with the gift of second sight. There are many versions of True Thomas’s tale and they bleed into one another and overlap, but the world he entered would be as recognisable to Odysseus as it would be to Cherry of Zennor. There’s that stream she crossed on her way to the lowlands, though here it has grown more fearsome by far than the river Styx: ‘For forty days and forty nights he wade thro red blade to the knee, and he saw neither sun nor moon, but heard the roaring of the sea.’ Further on there’s a garden green, where fruit grows that must not be picked ‘for a’ the plagues that are in hell light on the fruit of this countrie’. And can Thomas leave? Not of his own free will he can’t, and nor may he open his mouth, ‘for gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie’.

The day hung open on its hinge. The sound I had heard was neither chainsaws nor flies; it was a pair of red tractors out cutting the hay. I could see them now through the trees. One cut and one gathered; one built the windrows and the other bobbed them dry. A whole village would once have cut these fields, and now there were two men, their faces turned from one another, the cut grass shooting out, the cut grass raking in. As I crossed where they worked I caught the sweet, sickening smell of coumarins lifting from the hay. It struck me that I had not spoken more than a couple of sentences all day. Gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie.

What country was I walking in, what age? Across the hedge there was a perfect Tudor manor, three storeys high, with two great brick chimneys standing as tall as a man above the stone roof. As I got closer I saw the house was hemmed in by caravans and that the road was thick with dust. There were no people, just the empty vans, ranks of them, and the house that stood as silently as if it were circled by snow.

The light was falling unimpeded now, in sheets and glancing blows. I wanted, like Laurie Lee, to stagger into a village and be revived by a flagon of wine. Instead, I tramped through the dust, dodging blue-black dragonflies, and crossed the A275 by the temporary lights. Just before Sheffield Park Bridge the path ducked through a hedge into a spreading meadow of thigh-high grasses. And there was the Ouse, all of a tumble, the sun skating off it in panes of light. It was a proper river now, passing between banks made impassable by a wild profusion of mugwort, nettles and Himalayan balsam. On the far side a dog rose had scrambled its way along the branches of an elder, and the little faded roses grew intertwined with flat creamy umbels that smelled precisely of June. The water was opaque and so full of sediment it looked like liquid mud. Its surface caught and distorted the shadows of the plants and beneath them the castellated reflections of clouds slowly shuddered by.

I dropped down beneath an ash tree. My hair was wet at the nape, and my back was soaked with sweat. What a multitude of mirrors there are in the world! Each blade of grass seemed to catch the sun and toss it back to the sky. Big white clouds were pressing overhead and beneath them crossed electric blue damselflies, always in pairs and sometimes glued into a wincing knot. After a while, my brain cooled down. I sat up and drank some water and ate a slice of cheese. As I chewed, a movement at the field’s edge caught my eye. A wave of golden air was working its way down the meadow, wheeling as it went. It moved like smoke, a persistent, particulate cloud made up of flakes of tumbled gold. Pollen. It was June; too late for alder and hazel, too late for willow. I weighed up the options: nettle or dock, plantain, oilseed rape or – but it was less likely – pine. A pollen grain is identified by its architecture and ornamentation; it can be porous or furrowed, smooth or spiked. Plantain pollen is covered in verrucas; the pollen of golden rod bristles all over like a miniaturised pineapple. Echinate is the technical term for this latter design, meaning prickly, from echinos, the Greek for hedgehog.

Pollen is designed to drift. The tiny grains – hundreds of thousands in a single pinch – often have air sacs to help them float, as waterwings buoy a swimmer. These grains can travel great distances. In 2006 residents in East Anglia and Lincolnshire reported a pollen that covered cars and could be tasted on the air. It had come across the North Sea from Scandinavia and was seen on satellite pictures as a vast cloud: a yellow-green plume sweeping the coast, as the BBC report put it. Scientists identified it as birch pollen, the product of a wet April and sunny May in Denmark, though crop fires in western Russia may have contributed to the dust.

I leaned back and watched the cloud come. It could have crossed oceans, though it seemed more likely that it had risen from the neighbouring field, where coppery dock and nettle grew tangled amid the grasses. Didn’t Plato think there was a wind that could impregnate horses? It couldn’t have been more fertile than this generative swarm, twelve feet long and a yard wide, that rolled towards the waiting flowers.

That night I stayed at The Griffin in Fletching, a village that once specialised in the making of arrowheads; indeed, it was where almost all the English arrows in the Battle of Agincourt were cut. In the thirteenth century the manor belonged to Simon de Montfort, though he visited it rarely, and in 1264 his soldiers stopped here on their journey from London to Lewes, where the first great battle of the Barons’War was fought. Local legend has it that the barons spent the preceding night in vigil in the little church, though as with many stories handed down in villages it does not quite align with the historical record.

The Griffin was old too, and prided itself on its food. I arrived too early for dinner, and so drowsed for an hour in a tiny, sloping bedroom, the light seeping in through ill-fitting blinds. I got up at seven and went to the garden with a gin in my hand. It was Midsummer Night, and the whole country was basking, the sun streaming through the oaks and turning the grasses to flames. Near where I sat, a woman was talking and her voice carried across the lawn.

That fucking cunt, she said. Is that the fucking cunt, is that the fucking cunt that gave that girl the acid?

I looked over. She was sitting a few tables away, a tall deeply tanned woman with an elegant neck and long, slender legs. She was drunk. The alcohol had loosened her, though her voice must always have been loud. Her friend was smaller and chubbier, with a child’s messy hair and frilly skirt. There was a dog with them, a pug in a diamante harness.

Her friend was preoccupied with the dog. Smuggles! Smuggles! she shouted. And then they began to talk together, their voices overlapping. There was no one in the garden who could not hear them. One by one the other tables fell silent, as they might in the presence of royalty or death.

I took the morning-after pill three times last year. You might have triplets! I might have quadruplets! He slammed me up against the bar – girls can always look after themselves – he slammed me up against the bar and he said – Smuggles! Smuggles! – he said if you ever talk to me about coke – he was going out with that girl – but I wouldn’t have! He said if you ever, but I never, I wouldn’t have. I said I’ve never asked you for coke. That fucking cunt, that fucking cunt. No one forgets, no one ever forgets what you’ve done.

Two men joined them and then they were four. They moved tables and upturned ashtrays, mislaid dog leads and sunglasses. ‘The Church has decided nothing on this subject,’ says the Catholic Encyclopaedia; ‘hence we may say hell is a definite place; but where it is, we do not know.’ Other people, answered Sartre. And three centuries earlier, Shakespeare: ‘Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.’ You can’t escape, however far you travel. After supper I walked out into the churchyard where Edward Gibbon was buried, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and died nearby of peritonitis after an operation to drain the massive inflammation of his testicles went wrong and poisoned his blood. In my head the woman’s voice translated: he had fucking big bollocks. It was an English voice and it had been going on forever: parochial and incensed, intent on cutting everything down to size. Meanwhile, the swallows were screaming the sky into tatters. I sat on a bench and watched them drop, wings akimbo, shrieking as they fell. How strangely we spend our lives: mapping the architecture of Hades or the ornamentation of a pollen grain. No one ever forgets anything. It’s all piled up here somewhere, on the surface or under the ground. It never stops, that’s the trouble. It keeps on coming, like that golden wind, breeding from out of its own ruin.

I lay awake for a long time that night, almost stifling. It was Midsummer Eve, bang on, when the wall between worlds is said to grow thin. Hell and Hades, Dis, the courts and palaces of the sidhe that exist beneath barrows: all these places seemed very close, perhaps just outside the hot little room.

I have somewhere a map of hell that, in the manner of an anatomical drawing, shows its subject in both a transverse and a sagittal plane. In the first, hell is a labyrinth wound about with rivers: first Acheron, where the ferryman crosses; then the terrible Styx, which bubbles its way through a stinking marsh; and lastly Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which runs through the interior of the earth and up to Paradise. In the second drawing, hell is seen as a series of steps. They begin as the shallow declivities where the lesser sinners roam, and then they shelve abruptly, as a shingle beach does, into the realm that is known as the Pit. The great city of hell is situated at the edge of this pit, encircled by the Styx. Beneath it, in that vast hollow at the earth’s core, is the body of Satan, encased in ice.

According to Dorothy L. Sayers, who translated the edition of the Inferno in which these maps are found, the centre of Dante’s world coincides exactly with Satan’s navel. The chasm in which Satan stands was formed when he was thrown from Paradise at the culmination of the war in heaven, plummeting at speed into our own circling planet; an event that in its horror caused a rearrangement of the world’s geography. The landmass of the southern hemisphere rushed back in disgust, taking up a new station in the north; the sea flooded in to fill the gap, and Mount Purgatory was created as a small island from the displaced matter at the earth’s core.

Some elements of Dante’s cosmology reflect the beliefs of his time; others are a matter of his own invention. In the fourteenth century, many geographers believed that all the world’s land was in the northern hemisphere, and that the rest of the globe was sunk beneath the sea. But the idea that Mount Purgatory existed as an island in the southern hemisphere: this seems unique to Dante, who placed the Garden of Eden at its peak, with the celestial state of Heaven floating above it.

Dante situated Mount Purgatory at the antipodes of Jerusalem, which would put it in the South Pacific, 1,010 miles south-west by west from the nearest inhabited land, Adamstown in the Pitcairn Islands. Curiously enough, one of the most active submarine volcanoes in the world, the Macdonald Seamount, is only a couple of hundred miles from Dante’s site, a tiny distance in that vast ocean. The volcano, which was not discovered until 1967, is almost two and a half miles high, its summit rising to just beneath the water’s surface. Macdonald’s periodic eruptions have at least twice been witnessed: by the RV Melville on 11 October 1986, and by the NO Le Suroit and the diving saucer Cynara in Janaury 1989.

The findings of these two ships chart a submarine world of lava lakes and sulphide chimneys not dissimilar to the landscape that Dante and his guide so laboriously travel through. The mountain’s slopes are covered in a dense scree of lapilli, pillow lava and volcanic bombs in the shape of loaves and cauliflowers, testament to the furious upheavals that take place beneath the ocean’s surface. There is a fissure on the volcano’s eastern flank, and the seawater there is opaque and shimmering from the superheated gas that seeps continually free. It’s not hard to see why the interior of the earth might be thought to boil, but to imagine that as our final resting place: why?

As to the location of Paradise, it’s to be found on a bank on the path to Sharpsbridge in the merry month of June. I left the Griffin early, after a pain au chocolat and a bowl of prunes. It was the top of the morning, the very cream, and I skimmed it off and crouched in the cornfield, gulping it down. The clouds were coming over from the west like zeppelins, casting ballooning shadows across the metallic blue-green of the wheat. The field ended in a double ditch, and from it grew a mass of flowers in a profusion of colours and forms, such as is seen trimming the edges of medieval manuscripts. Black medick, I counted, buttercup, horsetail, ribwort plantain, hedge woundwort, musk mallow and curled dock, the clustered seeds a rusty brown. Wild rose, dandelion, the red and white deadnettle, blackberry, smooth hawksbeard and purple-crowned knapweed. Interspersed with these were smaller, more delicate flowers: cut-leaved cranesbill, birdsfoot trefoil, slender speedwell, St John’s wort, heath bedstraw, tufted vetch and, weaving in and out of the rest, field bindweed, its flowers striped cups of sherbet-pink and white. The stem of the knapweed was covered in blackfly, and a spider trap shaped like a dodecahedron had annexed a few pale purple flowers of vetch inside swathes of tight-woven web.

A matter of miles, and the whole landscape had changed, the woods and pastures replaced with cattle and crops, the sandstone ridges with the smoother land that precedes the Downs. It took me a full hour to walk a few yards, so absorbing was this new world. The wheat on either side of the chalk track was at different stages of ripeness: on the west clenched and blue and on the east a fuzzy gold-green that was full of larks. I sat on a concrete block where a footpath sign had fallen and gathered an ear to chew. The grains when I cracked them were milky, though those I plucked later had the taste of risen dough.

The larks were all about me, invisible and uproarious, carolling out the untranslatable song they are said to sing at the gate to heaven. I’d found an owl pellet the size of a greengage on the block, and I turned it now on my knee. It was full of tiny fragments of bone that looked at first like husks of corn, and the carapaces of beetles, which shone blackly and powdered my fingers with a glittering dust.

It was a day of uplift. Everything was rising or poised to rise, the mating dragonflies crashing through the air, the meadow browns clipping sedately by. On the other side of the valley there was a small plane parked in a field and as I got closer I could make out the airstrip that had been built about it. White arrows were rollered onto the mown grass and flaking whitewashed tyres were stacked in threes to hold the bulbs of the landing lights. The plane was cherry-red and white, the legend G-AYYT above its wing. I imagined it looping back from Paris, crossing first the blue English Channel and then the second home sea of the wheat.

The wheat was preoccupying me. It had here reached another stage, the long greenish hairs unfurling and turning it into an ocean of grass, in which the wind moved as it will across water, folding the pile first back, now forth. The wind worked across it and so did the light, and I could not at first piece together how the trick was mastered. The stalks here, on this sloped field, were almost blue, a blue that increased from the boot upward like a flush, though later in the month they would grow gilded and then bleach daily until they were almost drained of colour, becoming the common straw that was once used to roof most of England and is still required by law for repairing the thatch of some listed buildings. The heads of the wheat were golden; the hairs that are known as the beard a watery greenish gold that became bronze towards the tip. When the wind flattened the heads – ah, that was it! – they caught the light, which rippled and rushed down the hill in little ebbs and flurries. ‘The grain,’ explains a Roman treatise on farming, ‘is that solid interior part of the spike, the glume is its hull and the beard those long thin needles that grow out of the glume. Thus as the glume is the pontifical robe of the grain, the beard is its apex.’

The wind had risen and was turning the ash leaves white side out, so that they flashed when the sun flooded by. Between Barkham Manor and Sharpsbridge I walked accompanied by the chink of a wren and a fleet of electric blue dragonflies the size of kitchen matches. I set about stalking one, bigger than the rest, but couldn’t get within six feet of it, though I tried first to tiptoe and then to swoop. Its body was the milky blue of weathered plastic, those windblown scraps you find in hedges or caught around gateposts.

Sharpsbridge itself was stubbornly unfamiliar. I’d stayed here four years ago, in a house that was being rented by the son of a famous artist. It was another sweltering summer and we walked one night for miles, accompanied by the hum of pylons and the sound of a flute spilling from an open window and into the stubbled fields. I slept in an oast house away from the others, in an empty circular room, and above my head the sky through the cowl had been sown with fistfuls of stars. But the house, which was ugly, seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps my bearings had got askew. I kept remembering odd details: a garden full of raspberry canes, a wagon by the pond that had been left to rot beneath a swarm of tiny roses.

I was getting anyway into one of those trances that come from walking far, when the feet and the blood seem to collide and harmonise. Funnily enough, Kenneth Grahame and Virginia Woolf both wrote in praise of these uncanny states, which they thought closely allied to the inspiration writing requires. ‘Nature’s particular gift to the walker,’ Grahame explained in a late essay, ‘through the semi-mechanical act of walking – a gift no other form of exercise seems to transmit in the same high degree – is to set the mind jogging, to make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe – certainly creative and supra-sensitive, until at last it really seems to be outside of you and as it were talking to you, while you are talking back to it.’ As for Woolf, she wrote dreamily of chattering her books on the crest of the Downs, the words pouring from her as she strode, half-delirious, in the noonday sun. She compared it to swimming or ‘flying through the air; the current of sensations & ideas; & the slow, but fresh change of down, of road, of colour: all this is churned up into a fine thin sheet of perfect calm happiness. Its true I often painted the brightest pictures on this sheet: & often talked out loud.’

There was a stile up ahead and as I descended into a field of dock, poppies and wheat, I saw it first as a series of colour flares: rust red, scarlet and golden brown, from which a small, pale gold bird lifted, circled and disappeared. Is the red of poppies the same red as the dye the Venerable Bede describes the Anglo-Saxons making from the shucked bodies of whelks, that ‘most beautiful red which neither fades through the heat of the sun nor exposure to the rain; indeed the older it is the more beautiful it becomes’? It’s so very bloody you’d think it would stain, but it never does, though if the flower is crushed it leaves a smear of bitterness against the skin. The colour is lucent, fully saturated, the red caught within the petal as if within a sheet of stained glass.

The wind was right up. A kestrel hung on the other side of the hedge, wings tilting, its head as still as if it had been pinned to the sky. There were blackfly on the dock here too, and the next field was riven by a ditch. I wandered over to take a look. It was half-full of cool greenish water, from which grew a lovely proliferation of skullcap, watermint, marsh bedstraw and ragged robin, the leaves submerged beneath the surface and the blooms a little above it. A couple of bees were puttering between the flowers, the constant sound they made as lulling as a purr. I lay down on my belly and used the ditch as a sightline, following it across the meadow to the wood beyond. The river must be a field away, I thought musingly, and Isfield two miles after that. And then, in one of those tumbling rearrangements of geography by which the Mole knew he was near his old home, I suddenly realised I’d been here before.

I leapt to my feet. Yes, there was the river, coiling across the top of the meadow, almost full and topped with streamers of weed. It came as a channel ten feet wide and about as deep; the perfect size for swimming. I thought I’d fling off my clothes and tumble in, but now all I wanted was to curl at the margins and gaze down to where the water ran like liquid coal beneath the shadows of the ash. It was pulling hard, and much clearer than I’d seen it, though when I dipped a toe the sediment lifted in clouds from the clay and sent a school of tanned little minnows skeetering for the bank.

It took me the best part of an afternoon to travel the final miles to the farmhouse in Isfield where I’d taken a room. I went station by station along the waterside, beating the bounds of a route I’d walked for years. At the weir the banks were muddy and the pool very still. Up by Henry Slater’s poplar plantation there was a red cinnabar moth resting on an old tin can, wings stamped with circles of solid lampblack. Near Isfield bridge I sat under a blackthorn and watched a chaffinch moving between the hard green sloes, calling as it climbed. Two fishermen passed as I lolled in the sun. Both were shaven-headed and carrying huge rucksacks, and one was talking into his mobile phone. It is, mate. It is signposted. You go down by that garage at Piltdown, that Paki, and it’s down there on the right. It is, mate, it is! All right, see you in a bit. It was the first human voice I’d heard all day, though I’d seen a figure walking through the corn in Fletching and a man strimming nettles by a wall on a farm near Sharpsbridge, bare-headed in the sun.

The world might have been emptied of people, but it teemed with birds. The blackthorns on the bank spilled over with song. I could hear a wren clinking away, the sound like a 10p dropped against a bottle, and a whole Greek chorus of tits exchanging apprehension and admonition. I could hear them perfectly, but apart from the chaffinch I couldn’t see a bloody thing. After straining through binoculars for twenty minutes I became petulant. The same hot feeling came over me that I remember as a child from playing hide and seek. Come out, come out, wherever you are! I muttered to myself. Come out! – the same words Christ used to raise Lazarus to life. Perhaps the spell had become tarnished over two millennia, for I did not see so much as a blue tit. I needed the ointment that Cherry of Zennor had stolen. If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would be seen as it is.

Just then a sparrowhawk lifted across the roof of the wood, sifting the sky before dropping, light and lethal, between the trees. Oh, to see as a sparrowhawk does! My vision is 20:20; as humans go I am sharp-eyed. A hawk’s vision is 20:5 and its world is correspondingly magnified. There’s not a needle in a haystack that could escape its gaze. What’s more, the available spectrum for a raptor’s eye far exceeds that of a human. They have five types of colour-receptor to our three, meaning they can, for example, perceive ultraviolet light, thus tracking mice by the ultraviolet gleam of their urine. A hawk can also see true yellow, whereas the human eye has no way of telling whether the colour of a dandelion is the yellow of the spectrum or an equal mixture of red and green. It made me want to stamp my feet in rage, the thought of all I miss.

Perhaps I was being greedy. The vision I have is enough to overwhelm me; another two receptors and I’d be on the floor. I let go of trying to find the hidden birds and let my eyes rest on the horizon. The wood where the sparrowhawk had disappeared was in perpetual motion, the branches smashing the light to smithereens. The morning’s high cloud had given way to mare’s tails that streaked like fog across the glassy blue. None of it was as solid as it seemed. I remembered something Matthew had told me, a few weeks before he left. He was explaining the space occupied by matter. Most, he said – meaning 99.97 per cent – of the matter in your body occupies the volume of a mote of dust so minute as to be invisible. The reason why we’re not in fact so small is due to the tiny remaining proportion of matter that is composed of electron orbitals. These almost weightless rings of charge guard their own space fiercely; more than bones it is they that can be said to form the architecture of our bodies.

This fact, astonishing in itself, can be expanded out. 99.9 per cent of the matter of all the human bodies on the planet, all 6 billion of them, takes up no more space than a single sugar cube. The rest is made up of empty space and drifts of electrons, nothing more. As for the planet: a whirling cloud of charge with a fistful of protons scattered through it. I lay back on the ground, which felt solid enough, and tilted my head to the river. It had snagged a scrap of sky and a few wavering trees that kept fanning out to reveal gaps. Is it any wonder we persist with the idea of an afterlife, from Hades where the heroes rest to the heaven and hell of the Bible. Can this really be all there is amid the darkness, this coloured and insubstantial realm?

That night, after dumping my bag in Isfield and eating a bowl of cassoulet in a pub so recently refurbished it still smelled of paint, I carried on up the river to where a wooden bridge crossed onto an island. The waterlilies were blooming, yellow and without scent, and the black water poured between the posts, rippling coldly in the setting sun. There were geese in the paddock opposite, grazing alongside horses, and beyond them a field of maize or peas. A fisherman was casting under the oak, the fourth I’d seen that evening. His dog ran to and fro beside me, watching the line as it dropped out of sight. Everything steadies at sunset, the day drifting down or closing in. Two moorhens were on the far bank, dozing on a wooden step. The dog trotted off with her master, who had caught and thrown back a single silver fish.

When I turned for bed, the sky was on fire. I couldn’t keep up. It was impossible. I could barely even see. There was a lapwing in the fields by the Anchor, beating through the sky on wings like oars. In the ashes of the east a narrow moon had appeared, the same dull silver as the fish I’d glimpsed. A sunset is caused by particles of pollen, dust or soot in the atmosphere scattering the light. Though the particles themselves were invisible from where I stood, they had flooded the sky with streaks of Bede’s red, in Latin coccineus, the word he used also to describe flames. The red gave into other colours, each of them wrung from a whelk dyer’s vat: bluish grey, reddish purple, violet and indigo blue. Beneath them the river ran. It caught what it could. The last colours hung there, undissolved, in that looking-glass world that’s so nearly the twin of our own. In places the water was red, like the river of blood that True Thomas crossed. If I waded out now, where would I end up? I wasn’t sure. No matter how closely I looked, I wasn’t sure.