IN THE FLOOD
I STAYED ON THE RAILWAY LANDS for a long time. The light was draining away but the air was still warm and from where I sat Lewes looked like an island crowned with a castle, drifting above the dark sea of trees as if it were floating. It seemed to me then a town built on a fault-line or at a contested boundary: a place only imperfectly subdued, where the natural world and that which belonged to man had made no more than a precarious truce.
Perhaps a decade back, I read an article in the Guardian that suggested Satanists were at work here, and though it sounded like nonsense it left me with a faint unease about the place that took years to properly disperse. Then there’s the matter of Guy Fawkes Night, when the residents go lavishly crazy and parade through the narrow streets with blackened faces, tossing firecrackers and hauling huge effigies of the Pope and Tony Blair, which they later set alight in recreation grounds on pyres of pallets they’ve been hoarding all year. This annual ritual taps into a deep seam of anti-Catholic feeling that is said to derive from the burning of seventeen Protestant martyrs in Lewes during the sixteenth century. Some were killed singly, but on 22 June 1557 ten were murdered together in a grotesque parody of the midsummer bonfires that once burned around that date. Their martyrdom is said to have been the single greatest act of violence of the Marian persecutions, which were ordered by Bloody Queen Mary in her bid to eradicate the Protestant faith.
A place of fires then; and one with an uneasy relationship to water. Lewes was built by the river for a reason. It grew rich on fishing and milling and later on the barges of Wealden iron. But the valley beneath the town is set very low, barely three feet above sea level, and at times of heavy rainfall the water swells outward into land reclaimed from what was once a stinking, sodden marsh. For centuries this tendency to inundation affected farming, but now houses and industrial estates have sprouted in the floodplain, and the last time the Ouse seriously breached its banks the outcome was very bad.
It happened in the autumn of 2000, after days of storms and rain. By Monday 9 October, pools of water had begun to form over low-lying fields and roads and people began phoning the council to order sandbags. Each time the tide ebbed out the surface water seemed to recede, but the rain didn’t stop for long enough to allow the saturated ground to drain. On Wednesday night it bucketed down and at some point before the sun was up the Uck, the Ouse’s largest tributary, began to flood. Things happened very fast then. At nine o’clock the town of Uckfield was six feet under water and the river had turned into a torrent that sunk parked cars and swept supermarket goods from the shelves.
Over in Lewes, the Winterbourne, that little stream that once marked the northern boundary of the Priory, was also filling rapidly. Winterbournes, as the name suggests, come to life in winter months, carrying the water stored in the great chalk aquifers of the Downs. When rainfall is acute these aquifers can behave erratically, channelling water where it hasn’t been seen for decades, sometimes even centuries. To make matters more complicated, the Lewes Winterbourne coincides with the path of the A27 and the Brighton to Lewes railway line, and for much of its course is buried in culverts or diverted through concrete channels and drains. Now a culvert had become blocked with litter and the water was surging out into the new street of Tanners Brook and over the geranium beds of the Grange.
The Uck joins the Ouse at Isfield, and as the floodwater began to shift downstream the Ouse also breached its banks, gushing out into the land between Barcombe and Hamsey until all the pastures had disappeared beneath a swelling lake. By lunchtime Lewes’s defences were also overwhelmed and the dirty, rain-coloured river came surging over the embankments and into town. Water rushed down the streets at the bottom of the hill and by mid-afternoon the Phoenix estate, the Pells, the new houses at Malling and the old ones at Cliffe had been submerged. Police shut down the centre of town and hundreds of people trapped in houses and offices were rescued by lifeboat crews manning inflatable boats.
The peak came with the high tide at half past nine that night, when the water reached a depth of almost twelve feet on the Malling estate, submerging the houses to the second storey. The roads and rail links had also flooded, and by evening Lewes was almost an island, cut off from the outside world by the encroaching river. Water is sly; make no bones about it. It slips in anywhere, though the doors might be barred against it, and is most equitable, favouring neither sewers nor churches. Wherever you looked it was carrying off something: prayer books, children’s toys, underwear, the sodden bodies of rats. And then there were the things you couldn’t see: the rumour of asbestos, farm fertiliser and pesticide; the leached-out contaminants from graves and crypts.
The evacuees passed that night in a temporary emergency shelter in the town hall, which was built, oddly enough, on the site where the Protestant martyrs had been burned. In their abandoned houses the water continued to rise, poisoning the places it seeped into with a toxic mix of sewage and heating oil, shifting furniture around and saturating everything with what looked like beer and smelled like shit.
When morning came the rain stopped and the river began to drop, but by then the water had become trapped behind the flood defences designed to keep it out. The fire brigade used mobile pumps to suck it back into the river, though 70,000 litres contaminated with oil had to be drained off and taken away in a tanker. In all, 1,033 properties were thought to have been flooded, and over 2,000 hectares of land. In their wake, the receding waters left strange cargo. One photo I’d seen showed a woman standing at her front door, a bloated cow lying dead at her feet.
Over the past few years, similar pictures have eddied in from Tewkesbury, Boscastle, Sheffield: pictures of roads swept away and cathedrals surrounded by inland seas made opaque by particles of clay. These events are meat and drink to newspaper editors, though they rarely involve the loss of life that is common in other nations. But even the overspilling of a minor river on a small archipelago carries with it a larger story, and one that stretches far back in time. There’s something about a flood, something mythic and disturbing, that gets to the heart of our uncertainty about our place on the earth at all.
The Biblical flood, that primal act of destruction, took place because God – the temperamental, petulant God of the Old Testament, who the Albigensians thought was actually the Devil and who bears a decided resemblance to a Victorian patriarch of the Leslie Stephen mould – decided the world he’d created wasn’t as pleasant as he’d hoped. The people had become evil and so he resolved to wipe them from the earth, along with the beasts and the creeping things and the fowls of the air, all save a breeding pair from every species. This decision is explained in a curious passage: ‘The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon earth.’
Only Noah and his family were exempt from this fate, and so they built their ark from gopher wood, and painted it with pitch, and when this was done the heavens opened and it began to rain without pause for forty days, until the whole earth was covered to the depth of fifteen cubits, even the highest mountains, and everything alive had died. Things remained like this for one hundred and fifty days and then the waters began to recede, though it took a good three months further before the tops of the highest mountains were revealed and perhaps another three before the ground was fully dry. And after that God promised never to destroy the world again, adding resignedly, ‘for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’.
What a horrible story. I didn’t understand how a religion could be founded upon such a quixotic Creator, but I sympathised with the underlying anxiety: that we might at any moment be rubbed from the planet. There’s a long lineage of these decreation stories, which arise from all corners of the globe. Some – Atlantis, Lyonesse – deal with whole civilisations that are drowned, while others are more parochial in their scope. When I was a child, my granny used to tell one about a village that was sunk beneath a lake. The villagers had done something bad – what, Granny, what? – and they had to be punished – oh, probably they didn’t say their prayers. The village was in a valley that I always imagined very smooth, rollered like a bowling green, the houses huddled at the base. When the time came, a great flood of water rushed from the hills, with a noise like ten thousand horses, and the village was submerged. But the people were so wicked they didn’t die! They went on about their business beneath the surface, tending the pigs and ploughing the fields, breeding away down there as if they had gills. On Sundays they all trailed off to church, wicked though they were, and if you listened carefully at the water’s edge you could hear the bells pealing off the hours. Once every hundred years the spell wore off and the lake drained away. The houses dried and the people came out into their gardens and talked to one another in the unfiltered air. If you wandered through on that single, singular day the village looked like anywhere else, but if you stayed past midnight water would begin to seep up from the soil and puddle out across the streets and before you could one, two, three take a breath the lake would be drawn up over your head for another hundred years.
The story had got so tattered in the keeping that it resembled lace, more holes than thread. Where had it come from? The need to punish a wicked place by drowning must have been filched from Noah. As for the location, was it Capel Celyn, the Welsh village that was flooded to make a reservoir to provide the people of Liverpool with drinking water? The bells I thought had been borrowed from Dunwich, the medieval Suffolk town that was sunk beneath the encroaching sea, for it is often said that there were eight churches there and that their bells were sometimes heard by fishermen and sailors. Had she cobbled the story herself, or picked it up from somebody else? I hadn’t asked at the time, and now it was too late.
The prohibition against staying too long was also familiar. It echoed those tales of the underworld I’d been musing on a few days back, lands that opened and shut like clams, catching the unwary in their grip. What was the line from True Thomas? For gin ae word you should chance to speak, you will neer get back to your ain countrie. And I had a dim memory of another mythic city: Ys, the Breton Sodom, which was sunk beneath the waves by God in punishment for the behaviour of the king’s daughter, Dahut, who drank too much wine and liked to murder her lovers after a single night between the sheets.
These cities have resurfaced in the apocalyptic fiction of our own age, like the submerged London of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: ruined settlements with canals for streets where humans eke out a precarious existence if they survive at all. Water, in these fantasies, might stand for time, which also comes as a flood and has inundating qualities, or it might stand simply for itself. That winter I’d begun to pry around in the great sump of material that comprises the written history of the Ouse. The papers include newspaper articles, Acts of Parliament, coroners’ reports and the diaries and documentation of the Commissioners of Sewers, who were first appointed in the sixteenth century to ensure the river’s uprisings didn’t overwhelm the land. The 2000 flood, it was clear, was not an isolated occurrence, but rather part of a long and painful struggle for control, in which the town and its outlying fields were periodically encroached upon by water. Sitting there, in the dark, it began to seem to me that the folktales were a way of charting the same ancient, ongoing battle, or at least of managing the fears and fantasies that water’s wilfulness engendered. Either that or I’d strayed into the valley beneath the lake, and any minute now the river would rise gurgling up above my head.
It rained in the night, and I woke briefly at dawn to a changed landscape. The valley had filled with mist and only the tops of the Downs were visible above a fog the bleached pink of candyfloss. The cranes of Newhaven docks had vanished and the villages strung along the river were swallowed out of sight. I slipped back into sleep and when I woke again the false sea had receded and the valley returned, though Firle Beacon was still hung with dense white air, like those gusts of dragon’s breath exhaled on cold days. The rain had stopped and a gang of jackdaws were squabbling on the roof, crying ker-ack, ker-ack and jostling for space.
The town museum was just over the road, with the castle hard above it. It seemed like a good place to get my bearings, for the castle commanded the highest views and Barbican House, which I’d visited once before, was full of the archaeological specimens that the people who’d lived in these hills had discarded over the years. Within the castle precinct there were a few fine Regency houses and a bowling green that had apparently been used consistently since the leap year 1640. Opposite it was Castle Lodge, which had once belonged to Charles Dawson, the amateur geologist who discovered the Piltdown man in a bed of ancient Ouse gravels and is now credited with its forgery.
He was good at discoveries, Dawson. He also found, let’s see, the teeth of one of the earliest mammals, his own variety of iguanodon, a Saxon boat, the only known cast-iron Roman statuette, a goldfish-carp hybrid, a petrified toad preserved within a hollow flint the size of a lemon and an entire network of tunnels stuffed with miscellaneous prehistoric, Roman and medieval artefacts. The toad might possibly have been a genuine discovery, but the rest were either fakes or misattributions, as was his tale of seeing a sea serpent while travelling by ferry from Newhaven to Dieppe, its rounded, arched loops rising from the waves.
The story of the Piltdown man is almost the exact antithesis of that of the iguanodon, which makes it rather pleasing that Charles Dawson lived around the corner from Gideon Mantell, though nearly a century later. Like Mantell, Dawson didn’t go to university and had to fit his interests in geology and archaeology around the more prosaic business of a career as a solicitor. But despite this lack of formal education, he had less trouble being accepted by the establishment. At the time of his greatest find he had built up a considerable reputation for the range and quality of his work, being made a Fellow of the Geological Society at the age of twenty-one and of the Royal Society of Antiquarians by thirty-five. The discovery of the Piltdown man came towards the end of his life, and was exactly the big, globally significant find he’d recently complained seemed always to elude him.
Oddly enough, it isn’t clear when the first remains of the Piltdown man were found;though this is also true for Mantell’s iguanodon and does not in itself imply foul play. Dawson’s own accounts are vague and though they’re frequently retold they never seem to settle to a particular date. In the earliest written version – a letter from February 1912 announcing the find to his friend Arthur Smith Woodward, Keeper of Geology at the Natural History Museum – he simply explained that he’d come by chance across an ancient gravel bed, which he thought was Pleistocene, and found there (the grammar is odd but this seems to be what he means) a portion of what was to all appearances a prodigiously old human skull.
In the official presentation that the two men made to the Geological Society in December of that same year, this account is much elaborated:
Several years ago I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common, Fletching (Sussex), when I noticed the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On inquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug from a gravel-bed on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place, where two labourers were at work digging the gravel for small repairs to the roads. As this excavation was situated about four miles north of the limit where the occurrence of flints overlying the Wealden strata is recorded, I was much interested, and made a close examination of the bed. I asked the workmen if they had found bones or other fossils there. As they did not appear to have noticed anything of the sort, I urged them to preserve anything that they might find. Upon one of my subsequent visits to the pit, one of the men handed me a small portion of unusually thick human parietal bone. I immediately made a search, but could find nothing more, nor had the men noticed anything else. The bed is full of tabular pieces of iron-stone closely resembling this piece of skull in colour and thickness; and, although I made many subsequent searches, I could not hear of any further find nor discover anything – in fact, the bed seemed quite unfossiliferous. It was not until some years later, in the autumn of 1911, on a visit to the spot, that I picked up, among the rain-washed spoil-heaps of the gravel-pit, another and larger piece belonging to the frontal region of the same skull.
Having alerted Woodward to his finds, the pair returned to the site when the spring floods had subsided, for it seems the gravel pit was more or less underwater for almost half the year. In the course of their excavations, they turned up more skull fragments, including a chunk of occipital bone and a broken portion of jaw complete with two molars. All were apparently from the original skull, which they decided must have been broken up by a worker’s pick. In addition to this impressive haul they found a few crudely worked flints and an array of tooth fragments from a great variety of early mammals, including a Pliocene elephant, a Pleistocene beaver and horse, a mastodon and a hippo, though whether these were found in spoil heaps discarded by the builders or in the undisturbed bed itself is not clear in either man’s account.
The bed itself, Dawson went on to explain, was about three to five feet deep and ran a few inches below the soil. It was formed from dark brown ironstone pebbles interspersed with angular brownish flints of a variety of sizes, ranging from half a foot to grains as small as sand. The bed was finely stratified, and the deepest layer, lying just above the yellow sandstone bedrock, was darker and more gummy than the rest due to the presence of so much iron oxide that a pick was often needed to prise free the stones. It was in this lower stratum that all the in situ elements were said to be discovered. The pit was situated in a field on the Barkham Manor estate, on a plateau estimated to be about eighty feet above the Ouse, which had worn through the earth over the course of hundreds of thousands of years until it reached its present depth, leaving trails and drifts of river gravels to mark its passage through time.
After Dawson had dealt with the circumstances of the find, Woodward took up the story, turning to the matter of its implications. He performed an elaborate anatomical analysis of the skull before drawing his triumphant conclusion: that the Piltdown man ‘was already in existence in Western Europe long before Mousterian man’ – the old term for a Neanderthal – ‘spread widely in this region’. His announcement was rapturously received. The hunt for the missing link in man’s origins had been quickened when Darwin published The Descent of Man in 1871, and for some time now the British had been lagging in the search. Satisfyingly, the Piltdown Man – officially named Eoanthropus dawsoni, Dawson’s dawn man – was pretty much exactly what the anthropologists had been predicting: namely a creature who had developed man’s substantial brain without yet losing the ape’s prominent jaw.
That this hypothesis should be so absolutely borne out was regarded by several scientists as unlikely, though in that period no one went so far as to suggest forgery, preferring the theory that two fossil creatures had been found, one an early hominid and the other an ancient sort of chimpanzee. In answer to this, Woodward drew attention to the molars, which were worn flat in a way only observed with human use. It was a shame, both camps agreed, that there wasn’t a canine present, since this would clarify for certain how the jawbone worked. What a stroke of luck, then, that just such a canine did turn up in the course of the following year’s dig, conforming almost exactly to Woodward’s predictions and clearly testifying to the creature’s human status.
In 1914, the last find from the Piltdown pit appeared: a massive implement carved from elephant bone and looking a little like a cricket bat. And then, the following year, Dawson found another fragmentary skull somewhere on the Sheffield Park estate, though the circumstances and exact location of this are hopelessly unclear. On this private and poorly documented dig he also turned up another Eoanthropus molar as well as a rhinoceros’s tooth that conveniently dated the cache as deriving from at least the early Pleistocene, which is to say the beginning of the ice ages. In some ways, this last molar was the most significant element of all, since it proved almost conclusively that the first jaw and skull must belong together: the double coincidence of their co-burial being too outlandish now to be entertained.
Dawson became ill at the end of 1915 and died on 10 August 1916 at the age of fifty-two. It is often suggested that he hoped to become a Fellow of the Royal Society or achieve a knighthood in recognition for Piltdown man, and that his early death prevented this from taking place; certainly many of the other figures associated with the find and its subsequent analysis were knighted. As for the gravel bed, though Woodward continued to supervise digs and even moved to the area after his retirement, nothing of any discernable antiquity was ever found at Piltdown again.
There was something distinctly fishy about the whole story, but though the Piltdown relics were subject to what seemed like exhaustive testing by anatomists and palaeontologists, and though the Piltdown Man became through the years increasingly anomalous, as subsequent international discoveries revealed man’s evolution had proceeded not with an initial increase in brain size but with the development of a human-looking jaw and teeth, it was not until 1953 that the Piltdown riddle began to be tugged apart. In the July of that year Joseph Weiner, an anatomist and anthropologist at Oxford, was at an academic dinner when a colleague based at the Natural History Museum mentioned to him in passing that there existed no record of the exact location of Dawson’s Sheffield Park finds. This casual statement startled Weiner and by November 1953 he had, in a model of a priori reasoning and the application of the scientific method, proved conclusively that the Piltdown man was a fake. His team performed a battery of tests, many of which had been invented in the intervening years and were unavailable to the original investigators. Fluorine, nitrogen, organic carbon and iron levels were all assessed, and the radioactivity of the samples measured. The results were startling. The skull and jaw fragments were from wholly different specimens, and the jaw and teeth had been deliberately stained with a paint containing iron oxide and bitumen, in all probability Vandyke brown. This was true of both the Sheffield Park and the original Piltdown finds. Furthermore, the molars had been deliberately shaped by a file or similar instrument to give them their distinctively human shape. The Piltdown jaw in fact belonged to a modern ape, probably an orang-utan. As for the mammalian teeth that had served to date the finds, these were indeed of formidable antiquity but not indigenous. It seems they derived from a variety of global sources, perhaps including Tunisia and Malta, and had also been subject to artificial staining to match the ferruginous nature of the gravel.
In his 1955 book, The Piltdown Forgery, Weiner drew back from directly accusing Dawson of being responsible for this sustained act of mischief, which cost the scientific world years of wasted effort, though later he was unequivocal in his condemnation. There has subsequently been an array of lurid conspiracy theories that accuse all manner of prominent scientists. However, the slow debunking of Dawson’s record, much of it carried out quite recently by the archaeologist Miles Russell, goes a long way to identifying him as the culprit. In addition to his impressive tally of false and dubious finds, he was observed by witnesses staining bones and carrying out practical jokes involving the falsification of archaeological relics. Then there’s the matter of Castle Lodge itself, which was leased to the Sussex Archaeological Society on the understanding that they were to have first refusal if it was ever put up for sale. It’s claimed in Lewes that Dawson bought the house by subterfuge, carrying out his correspondence on the society’s headed notepaper to create the illusion that he was working on their behalf, though the first the society knew of this business is when they were served a notice to quit.
What motivated Dawson in these acts is mystifying. He’s frequently said to have been driven by the desire for recognition and acclaim, but this also spurred Gideon Mantell, who never falsified a bone in his life. It struck me that many of Dawson’s finds were attempts to prove a theory already in existence. He specialised in missing links: hybrids that explained the development of one form to another. One of these was the Bexhill boat, which represented an absurd mix between a coracle and a dugout canoe; another Plagiaulax dawsoni, the so-called first Cretaceous mammal. The Piltdown man, though considerably more ambitious, was in the same vein, being fabricated evidence for the already extant hypothesis of Darwin’s transitional ape-man.
Bringing such stories to life must have had a profound appeal for Dawson, and it’s perhaps his most accurate epitaph that he was known as the Sussex Wizard. But though the past is sometimes haphazard or resistant to interpretation, that’s not the same as saying it can simply be made up. Dawson’s work has left a stain. The debunking of the Piltdown story is relayed on the same sort of websites that provide scientific evidence for the existence of Noah’s flood, where it stands as gleeful proof that the evolutionists got it wrong. Which is the sort of afterlife you deserve, I suppose, if you can’t tell a lie from the truth.
I turned from Dawson’s house to the new home of the Sussex Archaeological Society, to which they’d moved in 1904. From the outside Barbican House looked Georgian, though I’d been told that beneath the brick façade it was actually far older. The place was arranged over a couple of floors of what had evidently once been a sizeable townhouse. I wandered through rooms filled with the detritus of previous eras, past cases packed with Roman tweezers and Saxon jewellery; a broken rapier; a collection of porpoise bones found buried in the grounds of Lewes Priory; a tile bearing the smiling face of Edward I, his lazy eye just visible; a finger ring with a charm against fever engraved inside it; and an ice-skate made from the compressed thigh bone of a horse. The information on the displays was equally quixotic. In the medieval period they’d eaten porpoise and oysters at Lewes Priory, and drunk weak beer because the water was unsafe. Wool dealers and tanners had thrived in the town, and the traders who passed periodically through were known as piepowders for the dust that clung to their feet.
In one of the downstairs rooms there was a woman’s skeleton in a glass case, a necklace of orange and green beads slung about her clavicle. Her knees were pulled to her chest, in the foetal position the Saxons used for burials. There were no Roman bones. A display about the afterlife explained that for the Romans:
Spirits of the dead lived on in the underworld known as Hades. The purpose of the burial ritual was to ensure the successful transition from earthly life to the next world. Provisions to help the soul were placed in the grave alongside the urn or the body … The body would be burnt on a funeral pyre which purified and released the soul. The ashes would then be placed in an urn in the grave which would be either a hole in the ground or a cist, an underground structure of stone or tiles. Mourning would continue for nine days after the burial. Romans never neglected to bury their dead as it was believed that the souls of the unburied were left to wander the gloomy marshland at the gates of Hades for a hundred years before gaining entry.
This last was the fate that almost befell Elpenor, the shipmate of Odysseus who died falling drunk from a roof on Circe’s island. His death hadn’t yet been marked when Odysseus descended to Hades, and he pleaded frantically for his body to be burned and buried in a barrow, complete with armour, with an upright oar to mark his grave. Better than the marsh, I guess, that place of desolation, weed-choked, frog-spawning, leaking dank clouds of gas that seem to burn but emit no heat. A marsh would swallow you whole and spit you out after the appointed century tanned bog-oak black and smelling of reed-mace and cat’s tail. Better to be burned; better to be tucked in a tiled chamber with your tweezers and your coins; better to go up in sparks than be where water has dominion and frets away even the soil.
The story of Elpenor is translated in one of Virginia Woolf’s Greek notebooks, which she kept to accompany her reading of Homer, Aristophanes, Euripides and so forth. Though she never went to school and was educated largely by her parents, Woolf’s classical education was thorough and exacting. She was taught by a series of private tutors, the last of whom, the suffragist Janet Case, became a lifelong friend. The notebook that describes Odysseus’s encounter with the dead was begun in the winter of 1907; a year after her brother Thoby was taken ill with typhoid and died in the wake of a family expedition to Greece. Thoby had been her fellow traveller through the classics, and it may be that she was thinking of him when she appended her description of Odysseus luring ‘the weak races of the dead’ out of Hades with the exulting words ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’
The study of Greek intertwines itself strangely through Woolf’s life, appearing unexpectedly in the more dramatic, even mythic, scenes. It was to Janet Case that she confessed her half-brother George Duckworth’s sexually predatory behaviour, which may or may not have gone beyond fumblings and gropings, and which apparently took place, among other locations, during Greek lessons at Hyde Park Gate. This revelatory conversation has been preserved – albeit second-hand – in a letter to Vanessa from 1911 that reads:
She has a calm interest in copulation . . . and this led us to the revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say ‘Whew – you nasty creature’, when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. By the time I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick.
Greek also took a role in Virginia’s madness, which resembled manic depression and was never satisfactorily diagnosed. During the course of her life she had five major breakdowns: two in the wake of her parents’ deaths; two around the time she married Leonard and published her first novel; and one at the beginning of the Second World War that ended with her death. In the interim she was often physically ill and beset by moods of anxiety and acute depression. These spells of insanity have been repeatedly written about, sometimes by people – among them Leonard, Vanessa and Virginia herself – who experienced them first hand, and sometimes by those who didn’t. Such obsessive rehandling inevitably hardens and reduces a life, turning its complex, contradictory material into a story, with a story’s reliance on intelligible consequences and colourful scenes.
In this manner, it’s possible to boil Woolf’s illness down to a series of vivid statements. From childhood she was troubled by moods of intense anxiety combined with physical symptoms like fever, headaches and a racing heart. During the madness that followed her father’s death she attempted suicide by leaping from a window; later she overdosed on veronal and had her stomach pumped. Often she was very depressed and found it hard to eat, and at their worst these spells would be followed by mania so intense that she didn’t recognise even her husband, heard voices, raved unintelligibly, and physically attacked her nurses. The treatment, which she loathed, was soporific: sedatives; bed rest; a restriction in reading, writing, walking and other supposed excitements; and a diet grotesquely heavy in milk and soothing, plumping foods. Indeed, it is largely because of his insistence on this fare that Leonard gained the posthumous reputation as his wife’s jailer as well as her carer.
Among these lurid titbits of distress, one element is often repeated: that during her second breakdown she ‘had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest language possible among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas’. This detail derives from an autobiographical essay, Old Bloomsbury, which was written almost twenty years after the event as a talk for the Memoir Club, a Bloomsbury collective in which members told artfully reconstructed life stories for the amusement of their friends. Its status as verifiable fact is equally artfully unpicked by Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee, who observes in the course of an elegant rereading that Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked poet in Mrs Dalloway who later kills himself, is also subject to hallucinations of sparrows singing in Greek.
It’s no longer possible to answer the question of whether Virginia lent Septimus her experience, or whether she invented it for him and then adopted it herself. What remains is the sparrows. They might have existed; they might not. Either way, they remain on the page, ambivalent and ecstatic, singing ‘in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.’
I left the museum then, but on the way up the motte to the castle there was one last reference to the Odyssey. The steps coiled around the edge of a walled garden full of pink and white valerian, the sleep-inducing herb that the Saxons called All-Heal. These steps had recently been rebuilt, and each was carved with the name of a benefactor. Amid the family groupings and cheerful exhortations to keep on climbing, someone had chosen the single line Keep Ithaca always in mind. Ithaca was Odysseus’s destination, but it was not until I returned home that I tracked the quotation to a poem by Constantine Cavafy, the gay Greek poet who had worked for thirty-three years as a clerk in the Egyptian Irrigation Service. And if you find her poor, the poem ends:
Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with such experience, by now
you will have come to know what Ithacas really mean.
The bees were working away in the valerian, and though the day was hot clouds were banking up on the horizon, dark below and impossibly clean above. Keep Ithaca always in mind. Say your prayers, keep God in your heart, have faith, persist. But what if Ithaca is no more than the island of the sirens, a place where time stops: a static heaven at the journey’s end? I’d given up faith in a destination, except to be certain that bones do not always stay buried and that I will undoubtedly be outlived by the plastic bags with which my generation has bedecked the globe, as the Romans’ tweezers outlasted their mortal bodies. Forget Ithaca. This is a drowning world, and there is nothing more sobering than regarding the hopes for the future of someone who is already dead. But then perhaps that is what Cavafy means: that Ithacas exist merely to keep us moving and will dematerialise like a rainbow when the journey is complete.
The shell keep was at the top of the motte, a huge pollarded lime beside it, growing out of a circle of neatly clipped lawn. I went through the doorway and up the precipitous stairs, clinging to the rail like a drunken sailor. There were no tourists; only a couple of pursed-lipped electricians surveying the wiring on the second floor. At the top I stumbled out into the light, and there before me was the town as William Morris described it, ‘lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalky hills’. The river slipped like solder through the fields, and on the other side of the narrow valley through which it passed the Downs rose up again in what was virtually a cliff of exposed chalk, which generations of jackdaws had riddled into holes to hold their courts.
I looked seaward, propping my arms on the rail and gazing out past the roofs of the town and the flickering traffic of the A27. The Levels lay cupped between the hills, flashed with tiny streams, the river carving a snake’s undulating path through lush water-meadows that barely skimmed sea level. I counted the hills I knew by name: Malling Down, Mount Caburn, Firle Beacon, Blackcap, Beddingham Hill with its two dewponds, the Red Lion and the White. The hills in the west defeated me, though dead ahead I could see the strange hump of Upper Rise, which was once an island riddled with rabbit warrens. At my back was Offham Hill with its bald chalk flank, and behind it Mount Harry. A watcher posted here could have seen Prince Edward’s troops ride out at dawn across the Paddock, and caught them later plunging through the Wallands in pursuit of their poorly armed and horseless quarry.
The landscape had the look in the morning light of something permanent, but its appearance was deceptive. Since the beginning of time it had been undergoing the kind of slow-paced, inexorable change that raises hills and carves out cliffs and valleys. All the world is subject to this sort of flux, which goes on beneath our feet and is only rarely discernable to the eye. But there was, as I had dimly seen the night before, another agency working its will on the valley. Man had been fidgeting away here ever since he arrived: man with his picks and his shovels; his restless mind.
Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the birth of Christ, the first early humans wandered in from what is now Europe, travelling by foot across the land bridge that would later be obliterated by the rising seas of the English Channel. At first these humans left no lasting traces on the landscape, but by something like 4000 BC a change in the valley’s pollen record shows that the wildwood was beginning to be cleared. Pollen is a remarkable record of man’s activity. In addition to exhibiting a great variety in architecture and ornamentation, it is unusually resistant to decay and can be preserved for millennia if trapped in acidic or waterlogged soil. Samples retrieved from peat at the base of Mount Caburn suggest the Downs were covered then by a dense lime forest that was gradually being coppiced or cut down by early pastoralists and farmers. Pollen from the cereals they cultivated has also been preserved, invisible to the naked eye, within the dark lenses of peat deposited by the river.
Time inched on. The wildwood disappeared, tree by tree, as forests have a tendency to do. The Romans came and went, leaving their urns of ash, their rational roads. Lewes was built in the Saxon era, on a grid pattern with narrow flint-walled twit-tens dropping away from the high street. A market was held there, and two mints; sometimes the skeletons of its inhabitants are found by metal detectorists in the hills nearby, curled like cats with their swords at their sides. Most of the villages I could see strung out along the river like beads on a rosary – Iford, Beddingham, Rodmell, Southease and Tarring Neville – were named in the Domesday Book and had been established long before the Normans came and built their castles, and filled them, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it, with devils and evil men.
In this dark, almost ungraspable period the lower Ouse was in all probability a vast tidal estuary, much wider than it is today and edged with vagrant, half-illusory channels that riddled through the mudflats. The river passed on its meandering way to the sea through salt marshes full of wild birds, which were themselves flanked on either side by fertile alluvial soil built up into terraces by centuries of silt deposition. The Saxons were a seafaring people and it seems from the records of Domesday that those who settled here were engaged in the herring industry, sailing to the North Sea spawning grounds to catch the teeming sea-coloured fish in drift nets, for the tithes these tiny hamlets produced equal those of some of the richest East Anglian towns.
Marshes mark the boundary between land and sea, and marsh dwellers earn their living in both directions. In Rodmell they made salt, cooking it from cakes of silty soil in coarse ceramic pans known now as briquetage, while at Iford there were two watermills, both long since tumbled down. The villages also depended on farming, but even this owed a debt to the river, for it seems that though the high downland was used for pasture, crops were grown lower down, on the alluvial slopes, while the hay to feed oxen through winter was harvested from the dank meadows that lined the water’s edge.
By the end of the Saxon era the practice of reclamation known as inning was prevalent in England’s marshes, and it seems likely from the abundance of meadows recorded in the valley by the Domesday scribes that it had begun in earnest here by the time King Harold was killed on the bloody fields of Battle, not twenty miles away. With his death time snaps into focus, for if the relics of the Saxon era are fragile or have a tendency towards corrosion, those of the Normans are more solid and abiding. The tower I stood upon had been assembled by Norman hands, and if I looked south I could make out the priory they also built, which was once the size of Canterbury Cathedral and was ruined not by time or weather but as a consequence of Henry VIII’s cataclysmic break with Rome.
After the Conquest marshland began to be more systematically reclaimed, and what happened in the Ouse valley is matched by work across the country, including the Somerset Levels, Romney Marsh and the Lincolnshire and Norfolk Fens. During this period ditches were dug to dry the land, and in time walls, banks and sluice gates were also built to pen the rivers in. Ironically enough, these works often had the opposite effect. The beaches of the English Channel are subject to longshore drift, the term given to the movement of shingle by the prevailing wind and tide. These shifting beaches have a tendency to close up the mouths of rivers, but before the marshes were inned their formation was countered by the fact of tidal scour. Estuaries tend to carry a considerable quantity of water, and on the ebb tide this great flux of liquid rushes through the river’s mouth, scraping away the gathering glut of stones. With the drainage of the marshes this scouring power was inevitably reduced, and by the early medieval period a drifting shingle spit had forced the mouth of the Ouse from its natural exit at Newhaven three miles east to Seaford. As a result, the river began to take an increasingly tortuous course, and at the same time to slowly fill with silt.
From the beginning of the clearance of the forests, thousands of years before, the river had suffered from sedimentation, and now, as it grew progressively more shallow, so it became increasingly vulnerable to damming by reeds and waste, meaning that spring tides or heavy rains led almost inevitably to the banks being breached. With such conditions, it’s not perhaps surprising that by the late Middle Ages much of the valley was underwater either permanently or when tides were high. The land was barely above sea level, and a marsh is after all a marsh not out of spite or stubbornness but because it’s situated where water collects. Upper Rise and Lower Rise, the two odd tumps of greensand that stand in the centre of the Brooks, were in that period rabbit-infested islands, and most of the cow-grazed fields I could see from the castle would have been wishes, from the Old English wisc or marshy meadow: at best waterlogged, at worst submerged. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who owned 400 acres near Southerham, he shrugged his shoulders and converted his fields into a permanent fishery: bream being more amenable to submersion than corn or sheep.
Then there was the matter of the weather. In the Roman period the sea level was a good six feet lower than it is today, and the Sussex coast probably extended a mile further out. By the Middle Ages, the sea began to rise again, causing intense problems for coastal villages. With the rising tides there came upon Europe a period of terrible storms, and it was during this time that the towns of Winchelsea and Dunwich began to vanish beneath the waves. The unrest persisted in brief cycles for more than a century and a half, and can be tracked through faltering harvest records and the anxious chronicles of the monasteries.
The destruction caused by these storms could be considerable. One of the most severe took place in the spring of 1287, when Edward I had come to the throne and was working to expel the nation’s Jews. By morning the sea had completely rearranged the eastern Channel coast, landlocking some towns and turning others into harbours overnight. The town of Old Winchelsea, which had been broken up piecemeal by the sea for decades, was conclusively drowned that day, and if anything remains of its two churches and fifty inns it is hidden beneath the massive sweeping expanse of Broomhill Sands, where the kite surfers like to play.
Something had to be done, and in 1422, in the wake of the infamous St Elizabeth Flood, which devastated the south coast and took perhaps five thousand lives in the Netherlands besides, the first Commission of Sewers was appointed for the Ouse. These bodies were gradually becoming prevalent in marshy regions and they functioned as a kind of water police, investigating ‘the annoyances and defects of repairs of sea-banks and walls, publick streams and rivers, ditches and marsh-grounds’. In 1531 an Act of Parliament granted the commissions extensive powers as guardians, empowering them to collect a tax from landowners known as a scot, and to use these funds for the upkeep of their region’s drainage. Furthermore, persistent misdemeanours could be tried in special courts, which had the right to order fines by way of punishment.
I’d seen in the county archive at the bottom of the hill some of the account books and records kept by the local commissioners of sewers, written in a multitude of hands and upon a multitude of papers. The earliest records are lost, but though the quill gives way over time to the typewriter certain words are repeated through the centuries until they take on almost the appearance of an incantation or a prayer. Over and again I read cast, cleanse, widen, draw, raft, shoreset: in other words dredge out weeds, dig clear the clotted bottoms of sewers and reinforce the embankments where they have begun to crumble and slip, that we may grow our crops, God willing, in the land we have wrung from the river.
But it was the Devil’s own job, draining that valley. You might as well have used a sieve. Around the time that Lord Thomas Cromwell was engaged in tugging down the nation’s monasteries he received a letter from Sir John Gage, one of the local commissioners, that gives a sense of how desperate local people were becoming. ‘The Levell of Lewes,’ he writes, ‘yet be in great rewyn and continually under water in winter, and for the most parte lykwyse in somer . . . my Lord Prior of Lewes sailed to Flanders to view and see things there . . . also we sent for him that inned the Marshe beneathe Saynte Katherins, and had his advise.’
By 1539 the needs of shipping as well as farming had become pressing, and so the commission decided that a channel should be cut through the shingle spit to force the river back out at Newhaven. This allowed the barges hauling Wealden iron and wool to reach the sea without running aground, but it didn’t take long for the shingle to build up again, for though a pier was put up it was unaccountably set on the eastern side of the river and so did nothing to prevent the shingle, which drove in from the south-west.
It took the Georgians, those rational thinkers, to puzzle out what needed to be done. In the mid-eighteenth century, after another series of floods and an abortive experiment with lock gates near the river’s mouth, which were rapidly pulled down for want of repair, a civil engineer was invited to view the valley. John Smeaton came fromYorkshire, began as an instrument maker and shifted by degrees into becoming the foremost engineer of the Industrial Age. Over the decades he designed bridges, harbours, watermills, lighthouses and canals; even a diving bell. His very first engineering contract had been to drain the boggy reaches of Lochar Moss, and the problem of turning fens and marshes into profitable land would occupy him throughout his life. As a young man he’d travelled to the Low Countries to research hydraulic drainage, applying the tricks he learnt there years later to the three great fens of his native county: Potteric Carr, Adlingfleet Level and Hatfield Chase. By the latter part of the eighteenth century Smeaton was much in demand as a drainage expert and during the damp June of 1767 he was asked by the commissioners to survey the Ouse.
His proposals were ambitious. One plan was to build a canal alongside and sometimes underneath the Ouse that would conduct excess water directly to the sea: a prohibitively expensive scheme. The other, cheaper, suggestion was to straighten the river by a series of cuts, dredging it clear and building up the banks until it resembled and functioned like a canal, with a gated outfall sluice at the river’s mouth that would prevent the tide from rushing in. It was this latter plan that found favour, but in keeping with the air of hesitation and haphazardness that seemed to attend all work on the river, the work proceeded only haltingly for the next twenty years.
Another engineer, William Cubitt, took a brief look at the project, but it was William Jessop, the son of a shipwright, who finished the job, as he was often to do with Smeaton’s schemes. In 1787 Jessop was asked to re-survey the river, and armed with his plans a group of local traders and landowners took the matter to parliament. The ins and outs of what followed are excessively complicated, but by 1791 the Lower Ouse Navigation Act was passed and a little later Jessop submitted his final scheme – closely resembling Smeaton’s – for draining the Levels and making the river navigable for trade. A few hundred workers were employed and, steadily, steadily over the next ten years the river’s more tortuous curves were sliced away, the banks rebuilt, a breakwater flung up at Newhaven and the channel widened and dredged so that it ran both swift and clear. Barges no longer ran aground at Piddinghoe, unable to ship their cargoes of coal, salt, fruit and slate upstream. Instead, it was the river that was imprisoned, compelled to remain within the reinforced banks that the navvies built: at a cost, by the century’s end, of nearly £20,000.
Did matters end there? Of course not. The lower river may have been canalised, but it still remained at risk of fluvial flooding when rain or surge tides overtopped the banks. One of the worst came in 1852, when the rains were so great sheep drowned in the fields, train lines were impassable, and harvests of hay and corn were beaten to the ground and rotted where they lay. There was another in 1960, of comparative severity to the 2000 flood, though it caused less damage, for in that period the floodplain hadn’t yet filled with the housing estates and supermarkets that clutter it today. As for the defensive work, though the duties of the commissioners have long since been absorbed by the Environment Agency the old techniques of casting and shoresetting have not yet been abandoned. The banks are still raised and braced, the vegetation dragged away, work that in 2008 was estimated to cost £410,000 a year, for labour is dearer now than it was two centuries ago.
I leaned my chin on the wall and gazed down at the network of ditches, glinting in the light like fishing lines. The river turned its curves, for though its crookedness had been corrected, it was never made entirely straight. For the last ten years, I’d laboured under the impression that this view was almost natural, and now I felt a fool. Landscapes, we all agree these days, are palimpsests, laid down in layers over the centuries. While this is undoubtedly correct, it’s also true that some eras work in pencil and others in indelible ink. The river bore the signature of the Industrial Age; its previous character might be discernible but it cannot be retrieved.
The first time I was shown the map that Smeaton used I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing. The Ouse looked intricate and tricky, plunging through deeps, meanders, shoals and shallows with names I’d never heard. Iron Hole, I traced, Bramble Shallow, Ranscombe Pool. Had there really been a fording point near Stock House, where the river now runs at a gallop through banks that rise a good six feet above the outlying land? And where was Sleeper’s Hole? Swallowed up by the marina at Newhaven, I guessed, while the Washing Place at Malling had been dredged clean away.
The clouds had been banking up behind Mount Harry while my back was turned. Now they started to spill south, following the river towards the Channel. I watched them slip overhead, rudderless in the fretting breeze. The river’s transformations bothered me because they seemed to highlight the wrongheaded rapaciousness of my own species, carving the world up with no thought to its consequences: behaviour, ironically enough, that seems doomed to bring an apocalypse of floods and droughts upon us all. I thought of the sewage treatment works trickling their poisoned outfalls into the Bevern; of the water companies that abstracted groundwater from its secret hoards in the Downs. And then I thought ahead, a century or two. Would the river have dried up? Would its snaking passage through the valley be marked by cracked earth, nothing more? Or would the sea have inched an advance until it took the town and returned it to a salty swamp, contaminated with the bodies of cattle and the bright bobbing plastic toys with which we’ve filled our world? Would a watcher stand here one day and see a desert, or would they look out upon a toxic sea?
Lewes’s periodic and continuing floods are a reminder that all actions store up consequences. Building on a floodplain, no matter how many sewers have been contrived, remains a risky venture – until, of course, we find a way to make it rain at will. And like those forest fires that are necessary for the germination of certain seeds, a flood is not entirely a destructive event, though I wouldn’t perhaps think that if my own house had been filled with sewage, my books crimped and mildewed, my clothes washed away. But even the Environment Agency is agreed that too much of the Ouse’s catchment has been reclaimed and that if Lewes is to survive the travails of climate change some land must be relinquished to the river.
I’d come, somewhere in my delvings, across a project to reestablish washlands on the banks of the Ouse. Washlands are meadows that can tolerate flooding of short duration, acting as holding bays for the excess water that would otherwise force its way through culverts and sewers and into shops and homes. As farming has grown ever more intensive these habitats have become progressively imperilled, though they once grew so richly that they could be used three times in a year, bringing forth first a harvest of hay at midsummer and then an aftermath crop that cows could graze into autumn and sheep right through to the winter storms.
The idea, cooked up by ecologists and historians at the University of Sussex, was to re-establish these wildflower meadows, reducing the risk of flooding downstream and returning to the river those fugitive grasses that I’d seen near Sheffield Park: bent and black knapweed, cock-foot, crested dog’s-tail, fescue and Yorkshire fog. The scheme was a tiny one, and yet there was an elegance to it that was deeply pleasing: it was both economical and lavish and made me hopeful for the future. Perhaps we will be able to accommodate ourselves to this world after all, instead of chipping away at it until the foundations collapse and the whole thing comes tumbling down.
I swung down the stairs in a rush, suddenly full of beans and ravenously hungry. I bought a slab of pizza and a can of fizzy sugar, faintly flavoured with elderflower, in a strange sort of grocer’s that had heaped in its window bread, a bicycle, potted geraniums and a spinning wheel. I took my lunch down to the railway lands and built myself a picnic in the sun. Jackdaws were flying together over the builders’yard, one calling Ka Ka Ka and another answering Clack Clack Clack. I lay back, swigging the counterfeit cordial and counting the flowers that grew entwined beneath the brambles. White clover, ribbed melilot, black medick, plantain which is good for sore throats, mugwort, curled dock, hedge woundwort with its protruding lower lip, like a currency trader with whom I once went on a blind and unrepeated date. The ground ivy was no longer in flower but I rubbed a few leaves in my hand all the same, hoping for that brisk aromatic hit.
After I’d eaten I walked on along the bank to the Rowing Club, which is on an island formed by the cut that severed Cliffe Shallow. The river had turned molten again. It was the colour of milk chocolate and just as glutinous. The surface was no longer glassy, but scored rather with lines and pockmarks, as if a struggle was going on far beneath, the stays of current cleaving together and wrenching away. The little boats swung grimly to and fro. I leant right over the river to make out their names: Star One, Deejay, Osprey, the tarp-covered Triton. A man on the far bank was lifting a kayak out of the water. The grasses here were the same metallic blue-green as unripe wheat. It was high tide, and the river had filled to just below the brim, so that some stems were reflected on the surface and others drowned beneath it.
There was another story about a submerged valley that I’d forgotten, and it came back to me then, striking a different note to those dreamy tales my granny used to spin. Floods and droughts are both predicted to increase with climate change, and the worries about insufficient water, as well as its excess, have begun to preoccupy the water companies. South East Water already manages two reservoirs supplied by the Ouse, but for years has been angling to build a third at Clay Hill, obliterating a valley just east of here to supply the region’s ever-increasing water needs.
Matthew and I once looked at a house on the edge of that valley, a slate-tiled house in the shadow of Plashett Wood with a huge neglected garden out the back. The kitchen floor was rotting and there was no cooker or fridge. One of the bedrooms had been painted a bright, unhealthy pink, with a frieze on the wall that depicted a cartwheeling pig. Someone had tried to tear it down and failed, leaving it to hang in dismally fluttering strips. The rooms smelled of dogs and misery. Outside the front door mint flourished in a border full of damp clumps of discarded toilet paper. I can’t live here, I said and so regretfully we left, for the location was pretty and we had become increasingly desperate of finding somewhere that would suit us both.
The house would survive, but the land it overlooked: that would be sunk beneath millions of litres of river water if the company’s plans were approved. The valley had once been a hunting estate owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and was now a tenanted farm, run in the old style, with crops grown in rotation in small fields that were divided by towering hedges. In the field boundaries great oaks remained, for as Thomas Browne said, generations pass while some trees stand. The ancient woodland that clung on in shaws was home to hordes of bats of many species: Natterer’s bat, which can catch a spider from its web; Daubenton’s bat, which fishes insects from the water with its feet; Brandt’s bat and the rare Bechstein’s; the swift noctule; the barbastelle; the brown long-eared bat; the whiskered bat and the soprano pipistrelle.
The bats rise each evening and cross the woods and glebes, hunting for beetles and midges above the remains of medieval fishponds. A reservoir will leave them with nowhere to feed or roost: no rotting trees, no woodland pools, no flowering meadows where the moths – the Oak Eggar, the Garden Tiger – circle above the pale yarrow and the glowing heads of clover. The farm and its scattered Georgian cottages will be plucked down, I guess, and there will just be water, an abundance of it, and somewhere far beneath it the ghosts of massive oaks.
I lay there in the grasses that grew at the river’s edge, disinclined to get up and travel on. I lay amid the mugwort that flourished in this stretch of land, that cousin of wormwood which vanquishes parasites and which St John the Baptist is said to have worn in a girdle about his waist. The cows were grazing in the fields, wheeling away when a walker passed, and in the distance the cars crossed back and forth above the bridge where the A27 swings up to vault the river. The chalk rose white before me, carved into portals and sleeping places until it resembled nothing so much as a mouldering tower block, home to a vast family of jackdaws, a gathering so unruly that it was once accurately known as a clattering. I watched them come and go for a long time. There were binoculars in my pack, wedged between the sunblock and a sweating lump of cheese, and I pulled them out and set the bag behind my back, where I could rest my elbows on it.
A flotilla of nine jacks had crossed in very high, circling on the thermals that persist above Mount Caburn, when something plunged vertically out of the sky. I held my breath. It landed on a narrow ridge almost at the top of the cliff and stood there, one foot forward, shoulders hunched: part ballet dancer, part pugilist. Peregrine!
In the 1960s the peregrine population of Britain had been decimated due to relentless hunting and the increasing use of pesticides on crops. DDT was a particular problem; it accumulated in the bodies of the smaller birds that were the falcon’s meat and caused the peregrines’ eggshells to grow perilously thin. When DDT was banned and stricter laws regarding hunting passed, the birds recovered and came back, pair by pair, from the brink. In recent years they’d begun to return to the south, favouring city blocks as well as the cliffs of old. There was a nesting pair that lived next to my gym in Brighton, and a falconer I’d met recently told me he thought two more had settled here.
The binoculars were jammed so hard against my face that I could feel rings engraving around my eyes. The bird footed casually at the husky grass, glaring from side to side so that I could see the dark markings that gave her the appearance of wearing a helmet. I couldn’t see if there was a nest beside her or if the ledge was simply somewhere to pause. And then, before I’d quite taken her in, she shifted her weight and rose sheer to the sky, up beyond the rook roads, until she was just a dark anchor among many dark shapes, all wheeling, a centrifugal surge of motion above the collapsing cliff.
I rose then too, and hoisted the bag onto my back. As I turned I could hear the water lapping almost at my heels, a flood tide rushing to glut the river. It rises and it falls, that flood, and in time it will have the barbastrelle and the brown-eared bat; it will have the Oak Eggar and the Garden Tiger; it will have the peregrine and the clattering jacks. In time I too will lie beneath the water, and here I differ from my granny, for I do not think that in a hundred years or in a thousand any one of us will be returned to the quick and ready air, any more than I think the iguanodon might rise and stalk the railway lands, or the soldiers that perished here climb to their feet and draw their swords. Right now, though, it is we who have the tenancy of this shared realm. I would like to think that we might pass it on, this small blue planet, cauled in water. Till a’ the seas gang dry, I guess, and it is blue no more.