BEDE'S SPARROW
THE THUNDER NEVER CAME. The clouds were lifting now and drifting south and as they rose the heaviness seemed to drain from the day. The scales that had covered the sun slipped or broke apart, unmaking themselves as they floated high above the valley, following the same invisible path that the birds took to the sea.
It was half past five when I reached the track that forked up to Rodmell. I’d been out on the Brooks two hours, tacking the banks in the teeth of the wind. To celebrate I sat down by the stile and ate an oatcake. My toenails were bothering me, and I carried out some rudimentary surgery with the Opinel, though it wasn’t pleasant work. I thought regretfully of the small nail clippers I’d left on my desk. If only they were in my pack I could, I felt, walk on into the hills quite happily for years, though no doubt the absence of mascara would also come to bother me in time.
The Downs seemed piece by piece to have acquired dominion over the landscape. Rodmell was tucked beneath them, the poorest and richest of the houses straggling up the sides. What day was it now? I counted back on my fingers: Friday. And how near was the sea? A cormorant’s flight, a crow’s; twenty minutes by car, an hour by bike, a morning’s walk tomorrow. As for tonight, I was staying at Navigation Cottage, the house of a friend of mine, which had been knocked up at the end of the eighteenth century to house the navvies employed to restructure the river. A father and son called Tompsett lived there once, and in addition to digging the banks their duties included opening the swing bridge to let boats pass to and fro.
I lay back in the long grass and gazed out across the Brooks. There was something subtly oppressive about these flat, dredged fields and swift, featureless river. The land should have been a model of man’s ingenuity and instead the banks and ditches left me uneasy, for it seemed that the river was held back by the application of enormous force, against which it threatened momently to break through and take the valley. It was this sense of strain that bothered me, and in a way I wished it would, for I find it uncomfortable when the inevitable is postponed. I imagined it flooding every trace of fences away, imagined it flushing implacably across the fields, filling barns and houses with knots of eels. Mind you, I probably didn’t have long to wait. What will it be: a hundred years before the rising sea slips in and England’s edged with marsh again? Fifty? What a future we have stored up for us, when an ooze of mud replaces these false pastures, sheep-cropped and sewer-seamed, on which the wind rolls unimpeded.
I wasn’t being fair. The fields yielded food, and while the sewers might not be pretty, they provided essential habitats and furthermore acted as sightlines, drawing the eye backwards through time. The one opposite, Celery Sewer, ran in a series of kinks from the Cockshut to the Ouse, providing the main drainage for the Brooks. Its outfall was barred by a sluice gate that closed with flap valves first installed in 1949 by Frank Dean, the old Rodmell blacksmith, with such skill that it was reported you could open it with your little finger. This was the same Frank Dean who dragged the river for Virginia’s body, the same Frank Dean who waited on the bank alongside the white-faced Leonard, writing in his own memoir years later: He was a brave man. It was Frank who organised Virginia’s cremation, and who was inadvertently implicated in the choice of music, for Leonard wanted the Cavatina from Beethoven’s string quartet no. 13 in B flat major, but felt too shy to ask. No matter now. Both men are long gone, though Dean’s forge in Rodmell still stands, as does the tiny garage beside it, its windows crammed with shelves of dead and dying geraniums.
Caroline texted me then. It was about the cheese, which was required for dinner and which I’d successfully procured in Lewes. God, I was starving. It felt like years had passed since the pizza on the railway lands, and centuries since I last sat down and talked with a friend. I galumphed up the path, slowing only to see if there were any dead magpies in the fields. It wasn’t something I’d ever witnessed, but Caroline swore she’d seen the pied bodies stuck on sticks like scarecrows here. Grisly as this sounded, it’s nothing on a story my mother recently told. She’d been walking in the fields near her house in Suffolk and had come across a tiny cage in which was crammed a dead chicken and a live and frantic magpie. Thinking the bird had made its way in by accident she opened the latch and prodded it out, only to discover later that she’d interfered unforgivably with the local method of trapping. The birds would later be killed by means of an exhaust pipe run into their chamber, and I’d read on a shooting forum that a farmer had reputedly dispatched fifty-two magpies in this manner; one, I thought grimly, for every week of the year.
Poor magpies. Hunters also use the dead as lures, propping the corpses in a field or dangling them from a fence to reel in the flock, though it’s important that their wings are broken and flapping freely for this trick to work. Other techniques include placing a full size owl decoy on a post for the birds to attack, or half-filling a film canister with pellets, which if shaken in the characteristic six short, one long trill pattern can produce a rough simulacrum of the magpie’s call. It is said that a human should be veiled when hunting magpies, for they are acutely sensitive to the shape of the head, and gun shops sell for this purpose a piece of cloth known as scrim.
I couldn’t see any birds, either dead or alive, but there were animals grazing on either side of me: sheep to the right and cattle to the left. After a while the sheep gave way to a herd of scruffy horses and then to a smallholding filled with rubbish. There were chickens scratching about between rows of vans and horseboxes, and in one of the dank little sheds a tethered dog barked and barked in a weary, unstoppable way that suggested it had been there for a very long time and didn’t hold much hope of leaving soon.
Navigation Cottage was on the corner of the village, a few doors down from Monks House. Fly saw me from her sentry post on the garden wall and raced to the gate, carolling her delight with that piercing, unlovable song with which the Jack Russell has been blessed. I delivered the cheese and then went to put my bag in the garden room. It was cool and silent in there, the half-pulled blinds filtering the light to a steady grey. I dropped down on the bed and drew the sheet over my legs. Two minutes, I thought, closing my eyes, and it was 7.30 before I woke again.
We drank beer in bottles with our dinner, sitting in the kitchen on opposite sides of the long table. There were Puy lentils to go with the cheese, those smoky earth-coloured lentils that taste sweetly of the soil. The house at its end gave into a room made of glass, which at that time had no curtains or blinds and was filled with the last of the sun. The dog bounced between our feet and then, sulking, sidled to the sofa and coiled there, a small, speckled comma turned emphatically from us. The beer had knocked me for six. I was so tired I could barely speak, despite my stolen nap. It may not even have been dark when I went back through the garden to bed, walking barefoot across the dry grass, the smell of lavender and stocks lifting in waves through the cooling air.
There was a shelf full of battered Penguins by the bed and I hesitated for a while, half-dressed, over Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Music for Chameleons, but the need to sleep had become overwhelming. I left the window wide and as I dropped away the little room swelled with the scents of summer. The temperature plummeted in the night and at dawn I woke briefly and fumbled a second eiderdown from the cupboard. At nine o’clock I came to again, and lay for a while swaddled in my nest, listening to a blackbird calling out its trilling song in stops and starts. After a little while I drew the last of the OS maps from my pack and unfolded it across my knees.
The official path – the Ouse Way that I’d been following more or less loyally since I left Slaugham a week before – seemed to ditch the river to swoop briefly up into the Downs between Southease and Piddinghoe, passing Deans Farm at the foot of Money Burgh. I didn’t mind that, but the stretch by the coast was bothering me. The Ouse gives out at Newhaven, where the ferries cross over to France, but the path sheered off just shy of the terminal, abandoning the water to follow the old medieval riverbed east as it snaked parallel to the beach along Seaford Bay to where the houses of Seaford began. There was a nature reserve down there, caught between an industrial estate and the A259, and the abandoned village of Tide Mills, which had over the years been a working mill, a sanatorium and a racing stables before crumbling into ruins on the edge of the beach.
I couldn’t decide which way to go: whether to follow the river to its industrial end or to take the path’s guide and veer east by the ghost bed through which it once ran. I drew a finger lightly down the page. Either way I’d be home tonight, and in a rush the feeling that had come over me in Lewes returned, the wish to slip backwards, counter to the current, as the Ouse grew by progressions narrower and more flashy, until I was at last swallowed up in the steep ghylls and woods of the Weald, the hidden land. Instead, I would be flushed out on a Saturday into the streets of Newhaven, City of the Dead as Woolf once called it. There were two lighthouses marked at the river’s mouth, one at the tip of the long curving breakwater and the other dotted like an exclamation mark at the end of the shorter East Pier. I’ll wing it, I decided: I’ll leave it to my feet to choose their path, but the decision was unsatisfactory and niggled me at intervals throughout the day.
We ate eggs and toast in the kitchen and I drank down two cups of coffee before I could summon the energy to leave. The little dog followed me to the gate and howled as I walked away, a noise entirely disproportionate to her size. The air smelt of roses and the sky was very blue above Rodmell, though the valley below was once again brimful with mist. Firle Beacon was blotted out entirely, and the other hills were reduced to faint looming shadows until the sun grew hot enough to burn them free. I strolled through the churchyard, stopping beneath the rookery ash to peer over the wall at the lawn behind Monks House where Virginia and Leonard had once played their intensely competitive games of bowls. The path to the road cut up between allotments and gardens and as I passed a run of houses I could hear a woman shouting Ella! Ella! Get back here!, though whether to a child or a dog I couldn’t tell.
The verge was bursting with poppies: red field poppies, mauve opium poppies and frilly-headed pink poppies, escapees from a garden, their elegantly crumpled petals absurdly frivolous amongst the mallow and the yarrow. The smell of roses had given way to that of warm earth, as edible as cake, and I could hear lifting over the hill the sound of bicycles and wood pigeons, a lawn-mower in the distance: that lulling summer music that makes the countryside seem sometimes as if it has been islanded in time a century back.
It was Leonard who was on my mind that morning. After Virginia died he returned to London and stayed for a time in a block of flats in Clifford’s Inn. It was full of people, as a hive is full of bees, and he found the compression of lives unbearable and so returned to the bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square, and lived there like a squatter, though there were no ceilings or windows, the roof was unsound and the rooms were contaminated with a litter of soot and rubble. ‘I got my loneliness and my silence all right,’ he wrote years later: ‘But I have experienced few things more depressing in my life than to live in a badly bombed flat, with the windows boarded up, during the great war.’
It was around this time that the bombsites of the city began to fill with flowering weeds that grew in great profusion among the mangled churches and destroyed streets: the pyrophile rosebay willowherb, which is known also as fireweed for its ability to colonise cleared ground, each single plant dispensing somewhere in the region of 80,000 almost weightless seeds; buddleia, beloved by butterflies for its honeyed scent and suffused purple; Atlas poppy; gallant soldiers; dandelion; Canadian fleabane; Oxford ragwort, which grew first on the ash-strewn slopes of Mount Etna and was introduced in the sixteenth century to Oxford Botanic Garden, from where it escaped and headed south by way of the railways. ‘London is gayest where she has been the most blitzed,’ a New York newspaper reported in 1944, adding that the willowherb ‘sweeps across this pockmarked city and turns what might have been scars into flaming beauty’.
It wasn’t the first time the city had flowered from its own ruin. London rocket, Sisymbrium irio, which the Bedouin smoke to cure chest infections, is said to have begun to grow in abundance in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, when the city’s core was gutted by flames, though it later became very rare, returning centuries later when the Blitz opened up the pastures of wasteground again, the weed rising up in wales of colour between the ribands of shattered walls. ‘Walls, roadsides and waste places,’ writes Stace, ‘naturalised in a few places in Br and Ir, a more frequent casual, especially wool-alien.’
These chance recurrences: mark them. All times are not the same time, but they are all going towards the same end. The London rocket returns in our cities as a clock returns to midnight. The rosebay willowherb swells up through the ruins of law courts and cathedrals, the dandelion marches across battlefields and infiltrates the gardens of mansions. Gallant soldiers, Oxford ragwort, Atlas poppy: these weeds have come and will come again, time immemorial, time without end. It is as well to remember this, for humans believe against all evidence in stasis, though the history of the world does clearly testify that it is rot and regeneration that will be our lot.
None of this would have been news to Leonard, who had watched men hanged in Ceylon and whose motto was Nothing matters, later amended to Nothing matters, and everything matters. He spent his life struggling against the various forms of desolation and disorder at work in this world: a humane, fiercely moral man who believed in civilisation without ever forgetting that human greed and stupidity made its existence precarious if not actively doomed.
After the grim, gruelling year that followed Virginia’s death, regeneration of a sort did come for Leonard. He fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons, and she, luckily, loved him wholeheartedly back, though she never left her husband and parcelled her energy and affection between the two men until Leonard’s death in 1969. Dearest Tiger, he called her, and bought her extravagant, coddling gifts: figs and strawberries, a Rembrandt etching, armfuls of hyacinths and lilacs from the garden at Monks House, a pretty emerald ring. It’s a blessing that he found this late flowering love, for the period before she arrived was purgatorial. Hunting through the Monks House archive for something else I once came across a photocopy of a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled:
They said: ‘Come to tea and let us comfort you.’ But it’s no good. One must be crucified on one’s own private cross. It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & and yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness.
The thought of this good man left so alone is heartbreaking, though it cannot be said that Leonard was a saint. Despite his native sympathy with the underdog, he had an odd and vehement dislike of mental disability, once commenting of Virginia’s half-sister Laura, who was described by the family as mentally defective and who had been shut away in a succession of nursing homes at the age of twenty-two or three for more than fifty years, that her death would have been preferable to that of George Duckworth, the half-brother who abused Virginia.
This harshness resurfaces in a distressing story relayed in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, concerning the family of his housekeeper, Louie Mayer. Louie’s mother had a severely handicapped son, Tony, whom she adored and who – or so her older son Harry told Leonard – ‘was really destroying her health and all happiness by her devotion’. Harry asked Leonard to intervene and eventually, just before the war broke out, he managed to convince her to have the boy admitted to a home. Later the family became alarmed that he was losing weight and insisted he was removed amid allegations of mistreatment. Leonard helped again, but he wrote disparagingly of their wild accusations, before adding tersely that the child died a week or ten days later.
‘There is something horrible and repulsive in the slobbering imbecility of a human being,’ he observed, as he attempted to unpick why the incident had proved so disturbing. But despite these views, which no doubt seem more shocking to our age than to his own, Leonard laboured throughout his life in the service of those less privileged than himself. Nor did Louie bear any sort of a grudge. She worked for Leonard for thirty-six years, and when he became ill in his eighties fought off the ambulance men who came to take him to hospital, instead nursing him herself with the help of Trekkie so that he could stay in his own beloved house. ‘Eventually we had to have the help of two nurses and then the time came when no drugs or special treatment would do anything for him,’ she wrote. ‘But I stayed with him every day until the end.’
I had reached by this time the steep dark lane that led to Southease. The little round-towered church was at the top of the village, sheltered by a horseshoe of magnificently shaggy elms. As I crossed to it through the graveyard I saw a couple weeding together amid a foaming sea of cow parsley. There was no one inside, and the nave had about it that particular stillness that is found only rarely, in small and rural churches, which seem by some knack of architecture or composition to have caught and held within their stones year upon year of plainsong and prayer. The building was very simple. The walls were white, the floor corroded tiles and the roof a series of vaulting beams that looked not dissimilar to the upturned keel of a boat. The traces of paintings were just visible on the plaster of the north wall: a few parallel lines in dusty ochre; the smurred outlines of human figures. The ones on the chancel arch were in better nick: a puffy cherub that looked in the late stages of jaundice and beneath it a quote from Psalm 75, the first line eroded down to God is the judge he, the second to down one, and the last to the single word another.
A friend of mine once sang an Ave Maria in here and it was as if the notes still held, the choirboy Latin of that old prayer lifting and shimmering amid the motes of dust. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I hadn’t said those words for a long time, funerals aside, and I wasn’t about to start thumbing a rosary through the decades of Joyful Mysteries and Sorrowful Mysteries. But I genuflected clumsily as I slipped into a pew, for though my belief is not intact I think there’s much to respect in the habits of praise. I didn’t kneel, but I prayed, head bowed, the simple prayer of thank you, the first that I was taught.
The Lord was depicted on the stained-glass window behind the altar in his guise as a shepherd, a lamb clutched in his arms, and I remembered as I sat there a sermon I’d read by another shepherd, a Wesleyan, on the subject of grass. His name was Job, and he was quoted in M.K. Ashby’s biography of her father, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe. ‘I’m talking o’ the grass,’ it began:
Of all the natural gifts of God I thought of grass to talk about. Grass is always with us. It never fails, even in the farming sense. It clothes the whole world as with a cloak. It feeds the beasts and they feed us. Permanent grass is a rest for the thoughts. ‘I lay me down in green pastures.’ The green colour o’ grass rests the eye, the neverfailingness of it rests the anxious mind; and the feel of it is rest for the body in summer season . . . Ay, but that reminds me, grass robs death of its terrors, for who but feels soothed at the thought of the green grass waving over a body that is weary and hurt, and laden with hard and painful memories? When I was young my thoughts would be too much for me and I’d long to be beneath the daisies; not up in heaven. For that you want newness of spirit. But God in his mercy lets us throw off our weariness and leave it kindly buried beneath the grinsw’d.
That’s faith enough, is it not? That this little life will be rounded with a sleep beneath the waving grasses, though for myself I might choose a bloom of cow parsley, the flowers arranged in white umbels tinged with green or pink, or a stand of the great masterwort, also known as melancholy gentleman, though it prefers shady places further north than this. I wondered if Leonard would have liked the sermon, for he loved the continuity of nature as deeply as he was immune to the solace of religion. He had no patience with any humbug about an afterlife, and returned from his wife’s funeral in a state as much of rage as grief. ‘He spoke with terrible bitterness,’ wrote his friend Willie Robson, who was staying at Monks House at the time, ‘of the fools who played music by Gluck . . . which promised happy reunion or survival in a future life. “She is dead and utterly destroyed” he said, and all his profound disbelief in religion and its consolations were present in those words. It was impossible to comfort him in his loneliness and sense of loss.’
The continuity he did believe in was of an earth-bound kind. In 1939, as the war approached, Virginia once called him in from the garden to listen to Hitler on the radio. He refused, shouting back: ‘I shan’t come. I am planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ He was right. A few of the irises were still blooming in the apple orchard in the spring of 1966, and he mentions them in the final line of Downhill All the Way. They smelled exquisite, Trekkie observed elsewhere: ‘a very violet coloured smell’ that seemed stronger than those grown by other people.
I took his point. ‘Naturally,’ says the Catholic Encyclopaedia on the subject of heaven, ‘this place is held to exist, not within the earth, but, in accordance with the expressions of Scriptures, without and beyond its limits. All further details regarding its locality are quite uncertain. The Church has decided nothing on this subject.’ Not within the earth: no, of course not. Not within this singular globe, whose evening skies are lit sometimes Mars violet or pink or mauve and filled often with flocks of birds that can in their passing bring down a plane. A plague upon your paradise, to place it without and beyond. I’ll stick here, for my money, and when I’m dead I shall be done, meat for worms, and the tangled grasses can make free upon me, green and greenish-blue and sometimes gold.
The light, I saw then, was striking Christ’s raiment, which had been coloured in shades of red: garnet red, vermilion, cherry red and cinnabar. His staff was brown and behind him the sky was pieced together from petals of Prussian blue. This window had been made in the 1850s, during the great boom in British stained glass, but something had gone wrong during the process. When the panes came to be fired the colours didn’t quite fuse, perhaps because the furnaces weren’t hot enough or else because there was an error in the mixing of the paint. Over the years the pigments were being shed almost imperceptibly, the glass returning stage by stage to its native translucence. Already the stylised yellow flowers had begun to erode, and a portion of Christ’s beard seemed to have been shaved clean away.
The light dropped white from heaven and as it passed through the window it became instead a flood of transmitted colour intermixed with dust, so that it seemed for a moment that Newton was right: that multitudes of unimaginable small and swift corpuscles of various sizes were springing from shining bodies at great distances one after another; but yet without any sensible interval of time; and continually urged forward by a principle of motion; now indigo, now yellow, now the saturated red of wine or blood.
On the way down to the water I stopped for a minute on the green to read the notice board: the adverts for open gardens and church concerts; a request for a mellow room-cum-studio from a Mature Pro Man, writer and herbalist, non-smoker, loves dogs. The sky had cast again and the air was tipsy with the scent of roses. There was only a handful of houses in the village but each, I knew from previous open gardens, had wonders concealed behind its walls: a swimming pool reached via a tunnel of pink climbing roses; a maze of box hedges packed with delphiniums, larkspur and a riot of sweet peas. The manor house at the top of the hill sometimes sold tree peonies and just along from the church there was a nursery run by a retired notary who specialised in the breeding of hellebores, those poisonous Lenten roses that produce drooping flowers of green or pinkish-white, and sometimes plumred and pale grey. It was too late for hellebores now. This was the month of the true rose, and the swags and stands let fall their scent as voluptuously as incense swung from a censer.
As I passed through the fields to the river the cows were lying down in the sun and the marsh frogs in the ditches called out their mocking cry, though I could not make out if what they said was brook brook brook or crook crook crook. I hunkered down to see if I could spy any little green-gold heads peeping from the slime and caught one in the act of croaking, its vocal sacs swelling massively from its cheeks like greyish bubble gum. The mist had isolated the valley, sealing Lewes and Newhaven behind walls of dense white air. The tide was running very low under Southease Bridge, and two kayakers had got caught there, poleaxed on the current. No good mate, can’t do it, one shouted, and as I passed above them the other called back I was absolutely flying along! No wonder. The river was a good thirty feet wide here and the water sped beneath the bridge brown and glossy, riffled down the centre in a long swirling line of foam. Every now and then a pat broke off and drifted back along the bank on a sleepy counterflow. The high-water mark was lathered with seaweed and the wind – I sniffed hard – carried with it a juicy whiff of brine.
The sea was changing everything. The low tide had exposed ledges of silky mud, pitted here and there with puddles, that a gang of herring gulls worked over for worms. A little further on I came across a motionless flock of black-headed gulls, set down like toys on the bank, their heads all pointing north. The plants were shifting too: the mugwort and grasses replaced by lesser sea spurrey and marsh wormwood, their foliage a pale glaucous green that withstood the constant salt.
In a field beside the river a single lapwing was patrolling and I paused to watch it work. It was a very regular bird. It tottered forward six paces and then stopped dead. After a moment’s contemplation it turned sharply through ninety degrees, and took another six-step run. Then it jerked to a halt and pecked briskly at the ground. Oop, it was off again: a rush of four steps, a pause, another five, like a clockwork bird that seemed always on the verge of running down. Flapwings, I call them to myself, for when they fly their chunky wings fall open like the pages of a book. Just then a heron lifted out of the reeds and turned a ponderous half-circle across the field, voided its bowels in a shower of white and glided across the river, its massive wings teetering minutely on the breeze.
The tide was still flowing out. Now there was a little egret on the bank, as skinny and delicate as a Japanese drawing, picking its way along the very rim of the water. It used its wings for balance, and its sharp head jutted forward with every muddy step. I spotted another in the air ahead, yellow feet pointed out behind it like a dancer’s, so white it made the sky seem grey. It’s a Johnny-come-lately, the little egret. Its traditional habitat encompasses southern Europe, Africa and Asia, but in the second half of the twentieth century it shifted its range north through France and the Netherlands, reaching the south coast of England about twenty years ago, much to the delight of ornithologists.
Not all aliens receive so warm a welcome. As the language suggests, there’s a touch of xenophobia about plant and animal immigration, particularly when the species in question arrives not of its own accord but because it’s been introduced by man. The fiercest opprobrium is reserved for those invasive types – grey squirrels; Japanese knotweed; American mink; Himalayan balsam with its scent of cheap perfume – that are charged with threatening the balance of indigenous flora and fauna, though I’ve also heard environmentalists rail against the pretty sycamore, which was introduced in the sixteenth century and has thus resided in these islands longer than many Britons. It’s a controversial subject, and the rhetoric can reach pitches of outrage more commonly associated with the Daily Mail on the subject of asylum seekers caught renting Surrey mansions on housing benefit.
I once saw a mink in the Ouse. I was rowing down from Isfield Bridge one August with my friend Tony in a small inflatable boat the colour of custard. We were making a great deal of noise, since rubber boats that lack rowlocks are not the most efficient way to travel, when he noticed a dark head watching us from the bank. The creature was the size of a cat, with sleek, glossy fur. After a moment or two it slipped unfussily beneath the surface and reappeared on the other side, gazing up at the boat. Then it dived abruptly and crossed again, rising shallowly this time so that we could see right down its body to the tip of its broad tail. It seemed an alert and playful creature, confident without having the unnerving cockiness of a rat. But these American mink, escaped or released by activists from fur farms, have decimated populations of water voles, which are critically low in Sussex and indeed across the country.
As for Himalayan balsam, it grows abundantly all along the upper river, bringing forth in summer those pouting flowers that give it the nickname Policeman’s Helmet. The nectar is intensely sweet, luring bees away from other bankside plants, while the pods disperse their cargo so aggressively that they can be flung some twenty feet. If you want to give a friend a shock, persuade them to hold one of the ripe green capsules, for the heat makes it burst in the hand with a horribly pleasurable recoil. The dense groves shade out other competitors, and hacking it back in summer is lethal as the seeds are shaken into the water to migrate downstream and start their colonies anew.
After the incident with the mink, I went to see the Otter Officer at Sussex Wildlife Trust, who in the course of our conversation described the Ouse valley as a desert. I understood what she was saying. I understood that the landscape had previously been richer and more intricate, that the roads and towns and farms with their polluting outfalls of chemicals had decimated the indigenous wildlife. I admired the work they were doing: the restoration of habitats, the tireless efforts to protect the water vole and black poplar, to encourage back the otter. Still, I was wary of her language, for there is a tendency among conservationists to devalue what is common or thriving against what is rare or on the verge of being wholly lost. I hadn’t walked this week through a desert, not by any means, and I didn’t see how it helped to denigrate the ten-a-penny creatures that clung on like grim death in the despoiled valley.
I wonder if this pervasive human dislike of virulent species, the pests and opportunists, is a kind of projection, if the Himalayan balsam and mink act as a dark mirror in which we catch ourselves: man the destroyer, man the weed. After all, who else is to blame for the great spate of late extinctions? It is man who grubs up habitats; man who trapped, shot or otherwise annihilated in this country the grey whale, the grey wolf, the Great Bustard, the horned dung beetle, the apple bumblebee, the Conformist, the Essex Emerald, the Flame Brocade, the Frosted Yellow, the Gypsy Moth, the Map, the Mazarine Blue, the Reed Tussock, the Swallowtail. If you destroy the habitat of a species, if you kill off the food it depends on – milk parsley, in the case of the Swallowtail – then it is done for. William Burroughs had a nice phrase for it. It no longer has the ghost of a chance.
Mind you, man will also go to great lengths to lure lost species back. I’d come across a story recently about efforts to reintroduce Great Bustards to Salisbury Plain. These birds were wiped out by hunting in Britain in the nineteenth century and a re-introduction attempt in the 1970s failed because the hand-reared chicks became too tame to survive in the wild, while six vagrants that appeared in Suffolk in the 1980s were shot – accidentally or otherwise – by men out hunting ducks. This time, chicks brought from Russia were being reared using a puppet shaped like the mother bird’s head, while the researchers interacted with the birds clothed in shapeless reflective suits that obscured their human frame. That, right there, seems to me the outer threshold of evolution. When God commanded man to replenish the world, was this really what he had in mind?
Two redshanks tripped me out of this melancholy line of thought. They stood twenty feet apart and screamed at one another, beaks snapping as they shrieked their piercing pew-pew. I must have frightened them, for they burst simultaneously into the air, revealing a flash of white beneath each dun-coloured wing. The cranes of Newhaven had appeared in the distance behind them, silhouetted against an almighty mackerel sky, the fish’s rib bones clearly delineated, the sun caught within its gut, its tail above Tarring Neville and its head at Telescombe Tye.
It was just after noon and the tide was on the turn. The surface of the river glittered slightly and on the far bank a train rushed up the valley. Stock Cottages were opposite and I figured I was pretty much exactly in line with where the old Stock Ferry used to run. According to the map a dead channel still passed by the ferryman’s cottage, a vestigial blue line as functionless as an appendix. The ferry itself had apparently run twice daily, taking the farm workers to harvest and back. It was thought to have been drawn by ropes and had once sprung a leak and drowned one Oliver Symons, shepherd, and his flock of fifty-eight sheep.
The path that runs from here into the Downs is said to be prodigiously old. It felt that way today, in the silent, unpeopled landscape. An occasional fish surfaced and the sun dropped like a blow, the ground beneath it beaten very gold, the dust rising in sheaves from where it had been struck. I felt like I was saying goodbye. I wouldn’t be this alone again, for once I came back from the hill I’d be rushed through Piddinghoe and into the sprawl of Newhaven. I plumped down on a bed of ground ivy and uncapped the water bottle. The river was like glass beneath me, a hawthorn wavering within it. Up above the martins were turning their cat’s cradles through the sky. I could hear the road, but it was an undercurrent to the larger silence of the place. Maybe, I thought philosophically, it was something to do with the turning tide, which opened a natural pause in the day. I drew a deep breath and as I did a grasshopper leapt down my top, bounced out and whacked me smartly on the forehead.
The track to Piddinghoe led past Deans Farm before breaking uphill across the dry chalk bed of a winterbourne. I climbed past tussocky banks of wild thyme stitched with yellow crosswort and the pale flowers of heath bedstraw. Selfheal and birdsfoot trefoil, which as children we called bacon and eggs, were also growing in profusion, and between them the bees moved in their drunken drifts. The cropped turf was scattered with lumps of chalk and great knotty flints in the shape of roots or teeth. I kicked one to watch it tumble and dislodged by accident a rabbit’s foot on a shard of bone like a lolly on a stick. The abundance of herbs was making me delirious. I counted as I climbed: plantain, agrimony, silverweed, cinquefoil, the evil-looking bittersweet, which is also known as woody nightshade and bears inverted heads of mauvish petals with thrusting yellow stamens. The sky above the slope was colonised by larks, rising in all directions, their voices as unbroken as the perpetual choirs of monks that are said to have worked in shifts of one hundred an hour to ensure God’s glories never for a moment went unpraised.
What I couldn’t see were wheatears, those plump little white-bottomed birds once so plentiful in these parts that their trapping became a kind of micro-industry. In 1743, Jeremiah Milles, a young antiquarian who would later become dean of Exeter Cathedral, went on a walking tour through Sussex and, as was then fashionable, produced an account of his journey. He was largely interested in castles and churches, but the hunting of wheatears had evidently intrigued him greatly, for he left for posterity an exceptionally detailed record of their capture.
I ascended the downs on which I saw cast numbers of traps for wheatears. These birds are about the size of a lark with brown feathers, which have a streak of white in their wings and tails. They are a bird of passage, for they come in the month of June, and go away in September, during which time they are most prodigiously fat and are a most delicious morsel; they are supposed to be the same with the Becaficcos of Italy and Turkey. Their name of wheatears I take to be a corruption from white arse, the rumps of the birds being remarkably white and fat. There are but few parts of England where these birds come, for they frequent only the downs, and are supposed to live upon flies, because they never find anything in their stomachs, though I imagine they eat rapeseed, because I saw many of them flying about it. They are a solitary bird, appearing always single, and are foolish enough to be easily ensnared. The manner of taking them is thus. They cut up two oblong turfs out of the ground in the following shape [and here Milles drew an upturned L]; across one part of this cavity they fasten a small stick with two horse hair springs to it and then cover some part of the cavity with one of the turfs in this manner [and here Milles drew a horizontal line across the upturned L] but so the light may appear at each end. These birds hop about from turf to turf, and when the least cloud eclipses the other end, they make towards it and are caught in the springs. These traps are laid in rows all over the downs, at the distance of two or three yards from each other. The owner of them goes round twice a day to examine and take out what birds are caught. One man has oftentimes a hundred dozen of these traps, by which all the neighbouring country is supplied with birds. They are sold here picked and trussed for about one shilling a dozen.
At first I found this story hard to credit but a book called Highways and Byways in Sussex confirms it, adding that the wheatears were not killed by the traps but remained within them, caught by the neck and unable to wriggle free, until the trapper – who was usually a shepherd – returned or someone who wanted what had become known as Sussex ortolan for supper took it and left a penny in its stead. During the eighteenth century the birds were hunted in such vast numbers that in midsummer the Downs appeared to have been ploughed on account of the abundance of upturned turfs, which were restored when what was left of the flock returned to Africa each autumn. By 1904, when Highways and Byways was published, the practice had fallen into abeyance, but the author, Edward Verrall Lucas, who was, it might be added, the biographer of Charles Lamb and a prodigious collector of pornography besides, is at pains to explain that larks and goldfinches were still hunted in their thousands on the Downs. To this end he describes a bizarre contraption called a lark glass, which had apparently once been popular in France and which I can’t help but suspect he might have made up.
The lark glass was apparently made from a triangular length of wood about three feet long and a few inches deep and set with little shards of mirror, which was attached to an iron spindle and rapidly spun by means of a piece of string tugged by a trapper, who sat perhaps twenty yards from the device. The reflection from these revolving mirrors possessed ‘a mysterious attraction for the larks, for they descend in great numbers from a considerable height in the air, hover over the spot, and suffer themselves to be shot at repeatedly without attempting to leave the field or to continue their course’.
This spectacle would without a doubt have intrigued Leonard Woolf, who once exploded a rocket in a field so as to watch a vast flock of starlings burst into the air, blacking out the sun. Perhaps I’d come back with a disco ball and see if revolving mirrors had retained their allure. As it was they were all about me: descending larks that dropped as if lowered on a string, wings horizontal, before plunging the last storey of air in one headlong forty-five-degree dive, rolling out all the while their unstoppered phrases of exultation. Not gone yet, they might have been saying, or can’t catch me, for we are more careful with our wild birds now, banning the trapping of all but the most allegedly virulent of pests: the corvids, lesser black-backed gulls, Canadian geese, parakeets and feral pigeons, which may be shot or caught in nets or those cages known as Larsen traps, though these must be provided with food, a perch and water at all times, as well as being checked at least once daily, particularly if a decoy bird is being kept inside. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 is explicit on this last matter, adding that all birds must be killed in a quick and humane manner and that ‘Canada geese held captive prior to being killed must be killed out of sight of other captive birds of the same species’, a nicety that is not extended to the sociable crow or rook.
As I climbed on up the slope, I remembered a poem by Raymond Carver about a decoy bird, a wing-tipped goose that’s kept imprisoned in a barrel by a farmer with ruined skin whose fields are filled with blighted barley. It’s fed all the wheat it can eat and in return it acts as an unwitting lure for other geese, which flock so closely round that the farmer can almost touch their feathers before he guns them down. The narrator of the poem, who has wandered onto the farm while shooting with a friend, looks down into the stinking barrel and never forgets what he sees. The goose stays with him all his life; an emblem, if a living creature can ever be so reduced, of betrayal and loss and need.
There’s something about this poem that makes me think the goose was real, though not everything Carver described in his tight drawl was true. It was written in the 1980s, a few years before he died, so even if it was it must also be dead by now. Perhaps it’s been replaced. Or perhaps the farmer went bankrupt or died himself, in a shooting accident or from the same disease that ring-barked his hands. Either way, it sounds an echo with another bird, this one caught on the page by Hemingway: the crippled green-headed drake trapped at the end of Across the River and into the Trees. This mallard is brought by the dog Bobby to the duck-hunters’ boat, ‘intact and sound and beautiful to hold, and with his heart beating and his captured, hopeless eyes’. The Colonel places him in a burlap bag in the bows, to be kept as a caller or released in the spring, and though it’s the Colonel who dies at the close of the book it’s this imprisoned, helpless bird that remains in the reader’s mind as the lasting symbol of any living creature’s vulnerability in this world.
In the brief lives of birds man finds a parallel for his own condition, and nowhere has this been achieved with more force than by the monk Bede, who spent his days in a monastery in Northumberland praying and writing and calculating the true date of Easter, and who once compared the existence of man to that of a sparrow. The scene occurs during an account of the pagan King Edwin’s conversion to Christianity in A History of the English Church and People and it must stand as one of the most beautiful speeches in the language, though I might add that I like its purpose not a bit.
The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter with your ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.
Passing from winter to winter again. Aye, that seems about the size of it. We’re set down here with no more clue than a sparrow or a lark, arising out of darkness into light and with the knowledge that we may wink out at any time. One thousand two hundred and seventy-four years have passed since Bede died in his Northumbrian monastery, and still we are no nearer to knowing what is to follow or what went before we appeared, each one of us, on this spinning earth.
Bede used this fearful state of affairs to counsel faith in God. Throughout his life, Leonard Woolf preached the opposite creed, and it’s not perhaps surprising that he has also employed animals to do so, for he loved them deeply and was rarely without at least a cat or a dog. His own philosophy – nothing matters – embraced the darkness that followed life, and he thought belief in the false machinery of heaven an act of cowardice. In Growing, he describes a menagerie he kept in Ceylon, and the memory of this fine collection of beasts, which included a pack of dogs, a baby leopard and a deer with a pronounced taste for tobacco, sparks one of his fiercest disavowals of the existence of an afterlife:
I do not think that from the human point of view there is any sense in the universe if you face it with the gloves and the tinted spectacles off, but it is obvious that messiahs, prophets, Buddhas, Gods and Sons of Gods, philosophers, by confining their attention to man, have invented the most elaborate cosmological fantasies which have satisfied or deceived millions of people about the meaning of their universe and their own position in it. But the moment you try to fit into these fantasies my cat, my dog, my leopard, my marmoset, with their strange minds, fears, affections – their souls if there is such a thing as a soul – you see that they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions.
As for Bede and his elaborate cosmological fantasies, elsewhere in his History he takes up the story of a Northumbrian man from Cunningham, who fell sick and while lying near death in his bed was transported – or so he claimed – to the furnaces of hell and thence to the fields of heaven. After receiving this vision the man recovered, much to the amazement of his relations, and became a monk, though until then he had been married. In the remaining years allotted him he liked to retell this tale for its pedagogical value, describing to his audiences the torments and delights that awaited them after death. His hell I couldn’t remember, but his heaven stayed with me, perhaps because it seemed so intensely familiar. It had the appearance, he related, of ‘a very broad and pleasant meadow, so filled with the scent of spring flowers that its wonderful fragrance quickly dispelled all the stench of the gloomy furnace that had overcome me. Such was the light flooding all this place that it seemed greater than the brightness of daylight or of the sun’s rays at noon.’
I’d gained a hell of a height in the last few minutes, ascending to a hedge full of wild clematis, flowering blackberry and the last few racemes of elderflower, the petals crisp and brown where they’d once been daubed with curds of pollen. In amongst the larger plants were tendrils of long-stalked cranes-bill, its leaves a bloody pink, and greater stitchwort, which fell among the darker foliage in a shower of white stars. It was very warm, and I threw my pack down and walked unencumbered to where the ground fell away. There was the Weald, blue-shadowed, and from it came the river, though all I could see of it were two snatches of false blue, the colour borrowed from the sky, which is itself composed of nothing more than gas and scattered light.
There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal. And though I know no more than Bede, I’ll wager there aren’t any sunlight fields waiting without and beyond, and that should one reach them one would anyway doubtless find, like the warrior Achilles, that it’s better to be the meanest ploughboy on this green earth than emperor of all the dead. This is it, this brief wheeling life, and between darkness and darkness the light of noon fell on the real, withering blooms with which the chalk had been festooned, and then, as I reached the crest of the hill, it fell on the rolling breakers of the English Channel, which had been lent for that moment the blue of heaven; the colour, as Derek Jarman said in his film Blue, of the terrestrial paradise.