12 August 1999. On Merstham station, Renchi looks serious: he’s arranging his blue-shirt bandanna, it’s going to be a long day. We aim to clear the southern stretch of the M25, leaving us free to walk the Darent Valley for our next expedition. Somewhere in the vicinity of Otford ought to do.
There is a threatening, milky haze over the town. The pattern of settlement – single street, mini-cab firms – exists to justify the railway station. Merstham is a fantasy England conjured by a distant viewer, a state-sponsored psychic: train, newspaper shop, white church with steeple. Then he ran out of inspiration, left the rest blank.
St Katharine’s Church is on a slope, hidden among ilex, willow, yew. Trees feed on, and express, the early-morning melancholy of the burial ground. Clipped bushes and globes of yellow privet organise the mound into corridors for private walks. This is a necessary halt for pilgrims.
We’re pleased to find an effigy of Catherine (with broken wheel) set high on the wall. The wheel, standing on its rim, could be taken as the arc of the motorway circuit that we have already covered. The second pan of our story is lost.
St Catherine of Alexandria protested to the emperor Maxentius about the practice of worshipping idols. She demolished the arguments of the fifty philosophers sent to refute her. They were burnt for their failure. Catherine was beaten, imprisoned, fed by a dove; tied to a spiked wheel (‘Catherine wheel’) which fell to pieces. Spectators were killed by the detonated splinters. When she was beheaded, milk flowed from her neck. Her church at Merstham, with its war dead, its generations of buried villagers, is coded with the devices of martyrology (scourges, nails).
The church door is locked. A Norman chevron decorates the arch. Renchi pauses, so that I can record another of our improvisations on Blake’s ‘Los as he entered the Door of Death’ from the Jerusalem frontispiece. Which is our own form of idolatry, offered to the spirit of place.
Paper boys (and girls) are the only sign of life as town gives way to broken countryside. We’re trapped on another island, another microclimate of motorway-bordered land. Dwarf children (sacks on their backs) wear bright red, hooded anoraks. The houses they service are detached, ‘his and hers’ motors still in the driveways. Wistaria climbs over red brick towards leaded windows: the usual argument between Arts and Crafts, Tudor beams, lamps in alcoves, neo-Georgian urns. Pink hydrangeas, ferns and hollyhocks gesture at the sentiment of lost cottage gardens.
Out of this resolute disregard for the M25, the intruder at the garden gate, they promote a village life from which villagers (the rural underclass) have been expelled. Country properties to delight any estate agent in Reigate or Redhill (sold instantly on the Internet) are in fief to other places: Croydon, the City, Gatwick. The suburb is no longer a suburb, it’s a denial of the motorway – on which it depends for its future survival. This is play country, a ‘lifestyle’ choice. Available to those with liquidity, equity reserves. The Balkanisation of the rail network, the horrors experienced by regular travellers, means that commuting is an activity for overworked, overstressed citizens who can’t quite afford to be where they are. The journey isn’t a respite, a convivial passage between work and home. It’s the focus of the day, feared and endured. The silence of these broken hamlets is the silence of deep trauma; the slow-motion sigh of those recovering from their brush with privatised transport, their hit of motorway madness. Working from home, logging on, is no solution: being part of the global telecommunications weave, you are still in Merstham. What’s here is what you have: a sequestration that takes you out of the crowd, away from noise, smell, touch. Marooned in an off-highway set, you are plunged into the monasticism that suits certain writers. It was never intended for humans. But, more and more, I sense a lack of mobility in these North Downs communities. The travel impulse has atrophied. Any contact with the territory that surrounds them is casual and unrewarding. The M25, that unmentioned cataract, is the defining reality. The road out is also the road back. A legendary presence that nobody wants to confront or confirm.
The interchange of M23 and M25 is like a postcard from Oregon, a rural fantasy. Pine woods and metalled silver streams. An absence of bears. Speed and stasis co-exist. Structural solutions in steel and concrete blend the picturesque with the functional. The interchange works best for pedestrians (crossing the M23 by Rockshaw Road); the very real fear of taking a wrong decision, hurtling off towards Gatwick instead of Maid-stone, is removed. Motorists who go wrong never recover; they’re sucked in among the hospitals that surround Coulsdon. Walkers are free to appreciate the art of the landscape architects: multi-levelled, dynamic. A three-barred safety fence replaces the five-barred gate as somewhere to lean, chew a stalk of grass, watch the road. A heat-singed motorway palette encourages contemplation; dark greens and burnt browns disappearing into a range of recessive silvers and blues.
Quitting this exhibit, with some reluctance, we strike out along Pilgrims Lane.
One thing there isn’t, pilgrims or no pilgrims, is breakfast. Now that we have agreed a route, any possibility of rogue coffee-stalls or bacon-smelling caravans has vanished. We are on our own in country that doesn’t want us. It’s a strange feeling, climbing and descending, in and out of woods, views across ripe fields of corn, and being unable to get any purchase on the experience. Our walk is compromised. We’re pulled between the territorial imperatives of Surrey, Kent and Greater London. The old Green Way is barely tolerated, a dog path, a route that might, if you stick with it, offer accidental epiphanies. It’s more likely to lose heart, be swallowed by a disused chalk quarry, an agribiz farm, a radio mast. Some unexplained concrete structure, fenced in, and surrounded by tall trees.
The road hums. The more the motorway is screened, the more the farm tracks shudder with deflected acoustic back-draughts. Farms have a back country quality. We notice such things as a low-loader with a cannibalised helicopter, a pad-dock of battered racing cars. A fairytale tower in a plantation of firs. Small dogs yelp at farm gates and sometimes follow us, large dogs froth and snarl. The focus on my camera refuses to hold.
HIGH PASTURES PRIVATE. Deserted outhouses, earth churned up, animals missing – removed for slaughter? Farms that don’t farm. Farms that operate as up-market scrap yards. Farms that yield to hidden clusters of houses that don’t cohere as villages; the scattered outwash of Caterham.
In Woodland Way (red brick backing nervously into forest), we come across: Pilgrims Cottage (signature in concrete of GJ & CG Morley, 1986). The Morleys – husband and wife, siblings, father and son? – weren’t satisfied with simply setting the plaque in a grey brick (fake granite) wall (lion couchant and carriage lamp); they reprised the name on a pokerwork board. Hung it like a Red River ranch.
Coming on Fosterdown Fort and a self-advertised ‘viewing point’, it would have been churlish not to stop, sit on a bench, in a clearing above the tree line, and view away. Until our eyes bleed. Down to the road. The irregular display of topiarised bushes. The litter bins. The display board that influences your viewing, by telling you what’s out there. The sights (and sites) worth noticing.
Samuel Palmer’s ‘Valley of Vision’ is our destination, the hoped for resolution of a day’s nervy pilgrimage – but in anticipating a coming blitz of visual sensation we have affected our approach, the long transit through the foothills. I’m having problems with focus. For some time, I’ve had to take my spectacles off, in order to read the small print on the map. These glasses are only good for middle-distance travelling. Another set comes into play when I venture on to the road in a car. And so, to keep to the spirit of the day (confusion), I leave the discarded spectacles on the bench by the viewing platform. We’re at the next map-checking spot, four miles on, before I notice what I’ve done: before I picture the bench in focus so sharp I can feel every splinter.
Dropping down through the woods, to cross the M25, the picture darkens. A red circle has been painted on the smooth grey bark of a beech tree. (Holmes shook his head gravely. ‘Do you know, Watson,’ said he, ‘that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation, and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.’ The Copper Beeches.)
Renchi, placing his hand within the red circle, calls up an Ulster loyalist symbol. Further on, sprayed across a slanting ash, we notice the return of a familiar logo: NF. This is the first time that River Lea (or Grand Union) graffiti have infiltrated the pleasant Surrey hills.
Next comes a tin kettle, hung by red rope, from a low branch. The kettle has been dented and punctured with bullet holes.
At the top of a lane, on the wood’s edge, is a compound of caravans and tumbledown bungalows, guarded by dogs, XMAS TREES. A broad white arrow points towards a yard. Horses’ heads (plaster) are nailed to the gateposts. A bright yellow RASCAL van alongside a plum-coloured pantechnicon, behind a chainlink fence. A low-loader hidden under electric-green tarpaulin. Five dogs, mixed breeds, shaggy, small, ridiculously loud, snap and yelp and snarl, back off when challenged, turn – after fifteen yards – and attack again.
A bow window, with fresh white trim, is thrown open. This combination of elongated kennel and neo-Georgian improvements is unusual. A non-travelling traveller, dealer in Xmas trees (scrap-metal, poultry, the black stuff), screams abuse. Specific threats. He’s seen the camera. Luckily, he’s still in bed – in vest – possibly on the job; there’s a high flush to the man (between pleasure postponed and apoplexy). He asks if we’ll be kind enough to wait a few moments while he slips the dog. The unleashed mongrels don’t count. They nip and run. The real beasts, drooling, heads too heavy to pick from the dirt, are on chains.
We trot on, briskly, to the motorway bridge. From where I spot a tea stall sign. Renchi is adamant: we don’t have the time. He’s in the middle, just now, of complicated holiday season travel plans that carry him from a Wordsworth seminar in Cumbria to a New Age symposium in Portugal. He has inherited his father’s Citroën.
Soft estate walking – there’s no other means of reconnecting with the Pilgrims Way, on the north of the M25 – is like plunging into a river in spate. Juggernauts lurch on to Junction 6 (Sevenoaks, Dartford). We opt for the A22 (E. Grinstead, Eastbourne) – before recrossing the motorway by Flower Lane.
A police bike pulls us. No sane person would voluntarily offer themselves as roadkill. August is the optimum period for animal ironing, clogging tyre grooves with flesh and fur. Fifty thousand badgers, 100,000 foxes and at least 10 million birds: ex’d, maimed, mutilated. The Glorious Twelfth! We are walking on the day when grouse are slaughtered in the Highlands, on the Yorkshire Moors. In the south, traditionalists use the M25; a motor vehicle hurtling at seventy, eighty, ninety miles an hour. There are tunnels under the road for badgers, but nothing for humans: as we explain to the policeman. Entry to the fields is forbidden. There is no other route.
I’ve had meals in Shoreditch where people raved over the pheasant – before discovering that the feast was roadkill. Birds scraped from tarmac. Watercress scavenged from Chiltern pools. A room of drooling carnivores begging for the recipe, the frisson of scorched rubber across traumatised meat.
And here it is, courtesy of Jonathan Thomson:
The entire process is as follows:
• Having gathered the creature from the road, I check to ensure the condition of the bird is reasonable – I reject those which are infested with maggots or are too damaged from the impact of the collision.
• Once gathered next step is to pluck the bird – I always do this while still in the country – this is a problematic task in central London.
• A good ‘hanging’, from the neck with entrails intact, is essential to bring the flavour on – if this step is missed or the duration of the hanging is too short the meat does not develop a sufficiently ‘gamey’ flavour. The hanging process and the smell this produces stirs many adverse comments from those who live in our building; the last hanging bird was hauled down because of the strength of protest rather than the meat being sufficiently matured.
• On completion of the hanging the bird is gutted and cleaned.
• The cooking is as follows: I very slowly cook the legs in braise of white wine, game stock, onions, carrots, juniper berries and thyme. The dish is best cooked in a heavy skillet. Method is as follows: sear the legs over a high heat in butter and oil. Remove; add salt & pepper and sweat off onions, carrots and celery until softened – then add 2 crushed garlic cloves. Deglaze the pan with either white wine or calvados – ensure that all the sediment is scraped from the bottom of the pan. Replace the pheasant legs and add enough game stock to generously cover the bottom of the pan. Put into a moderate oven and cook slowly until tender. To finish: remove the legs (keep at serving temperature), strain off the braising vegetables and reserve the liquor in a saucepan (this is optional, the brazing vegetables can be retained). Place over a high heat and reduce, thicken the sauce with cream.
• The breasts, which are removed from the carcass before cooking, are cooked very quickly and served close to rare – dependent on individual taste. I cook the breasts on a skittle over a medium heat in a little butter and olive oil. Once cooked they are sliced and plated – they are served with a sauce which is made from the stock of the boned/legged bird and sometimes finished with cream to thicken.
• The vegetables I like to serve with this dish are roughly mashed potatoes, fresh fine green beans and carrots.
It’s not just a Carl Hiaasen menu of birds and hedgehogs and foxes, it’s fish. ‘Impervious edges to roads,’ as journalist Sanjida O’Connell reports, ‘increase the flow of water from the road into streams – leading to a build up of sediment, increased water temperature and pollution’. Salmon, apparently, are very sensitive to irregular ‘flash flows’. Salmon loss affects many other species, including bears and orca whales. The chain of interconnections is alarming: Moby-Dick threatened with extinction by the Art Nouveau filigree of Junction 5, its run-off into the River Darent.
Highway chemicals leech into streams. Heavy metals overwhelm motorway–fringe wildlife. Rock salt, used in road gritting, is toxic to many species of plant. Fish are unwell. Song birds, sensitive to the M25’s acoustic footprints, back off. Vibrations from the constant, twenty-four-hour madness of traffic persuades earthworms to keep their heads down; leading to an excess of crows – and crowkill – as birds try to prise their breakfast from unsuspected depths.
Now seriously peckish, almost ready to dispute crow-spoil, we lengthen our stride. If we stick with the Pilgrims Way, the first refuelling station will be Westerham; which is over the Kent border and about seven miles on. Sometimes we’re in deep countryside, no settlement in sight, no trace of the road – other than a continuing sense of unreality. Tidy fields, without cattle. Well-kept B-roads linking villages and farms. A lush buffer zone, a cushion. The unseen motorway as the dominant presence.
We’re always within a single field of tarmac, or admiring the pinkish-silver stream from a safe distance. The temperature is climbing. A sticky morning. Renchi abandons shirt and bandanna. We swim through a huge field of what looks like sweet corn, the feeling is Mediterranean. Like Godard’s Pierrot le Fou. Bright, comic-book colours; greens and blues. A hazy sun. Camions jostling for position on a shimmering road. The dry morse of crickets.
It’s when we sit to interrogate the map that I miss my spectacles; the act of having to take them off, or shove them up towards a vanished hairline. We’re on the nursery slopes, an arable field (unoptioned golf course) giving a clear view of the motorway, the steady mid-morning traffic.
I’ll go back. That’s my first thought. The bench. The ‘viewing point’. Which means: all that way along the edge of the quarry, the steps cut into the hillside, the travellers’ bungalows. The dogs. I’ll leave my rucksack, try a gentle jog – while Renchi, dressed only in shorts and boots, dries his shirts on the fence; presses his hands together, meditates on the landscape and his passage through it.
I lurch through a couple of fields, down among the corn, up the next slope, then change my mind. A degree of softness in focus is no problem. It might even be a benefit. Elective Impressionism. Anything close is still sharp. I’d rather put up with the hassle (and expense) of getting another pair of specs than endure the additional hours in Surrey. Let my Kingsland Road frames be the necessary sacrifice.
Renchi, in all probability, hasn’t noticed that I’ve gone. Dark blue sweater, light blue bandanna, white T-shirt: draped along the fence. Gently steaming. The pale-skinned, half-nude mendicant squats in the dirt, contemplating our assault on the Valley of Vision.
He has become, in my conceit, both a reprise and an anticipation of his great-grand-uncle, Clarence Bicknell. A physical embodiment of the Eternal Return and a tribute to the Victorian botanist (hillwalker, watercolourist, tracer of the rock-engravings of Monte Bego in the maritime Alps). Memory is homage. Engraved by time and experience, we grow to look like daguerreotypes of ancestors who have rehearsed our destiny. Except that they did it with more conviction, more innocence. Instead of hopping, boulder to boulder over black-violet sandstone and fine-grained schist, taking rubbings of Early Bronze Age rock carvings, we slide down Beckton Alp, photographing middens of urban rubbish.
Part of our task in this circumnavigation of London is to become our fathers, our grandfathers; to learn respect for obscured and obliterated lines of biography. Accessing the fugue, we parody lives that preceded our own. Reading Victorian memoirs, we come to believe that these events have not yet happened.
Renchi was showing me the book, on the day of our walk around the City’s Roman walls. We were sitting in the café at the Museum of London. A High Way to Heaven (Clarence Bicknell and the ‘Vallée Des Marveilles’) by Christopher Chippindale. Marc Atkins, who had just met Renchi for the first time, was there. With his camera. I held the cover of the book close to Renchi’s face and asked Marc to take the shot. It’s an extraordinary double portrait: the slanted book becomes a mirror. Twin grey beards, spruce. Twin noses. Heavy eyebrows. Faces full of stalled wonder. The sloping shoulders of Clarence in his pale jacket slide into Renchi’s T-shirt (‘Fruit of the Loom’). On the wall of the cafe, above the coffee machine: SUMMER DESSERTS.
Reading about Clarence, I discover a template for Renchi; not an explanation, or psychological profile, but a concurrent stream of particles navigating a way around a similar landscape. ‘Then’ and ‘now’ are distinctions I can’t make. Clarence Bicknell, the youngest son of a wealthy businessman, entered (and abandoned) the church; he travelled, settled at Bordighera on the Mediterranean coast of north-west Italy, a few miles from the French border. He took long daily walks. He explored Liguria, painting more than 3,000 watercolours of plants. He was a vegetarian and a promoter of Esperanto (attending conferences in such places as Krakow). He commissioned a house (decorated with Art Nouveau foliage and playful mottoes) on the slopes below the high Val Fontanalba – where he would carry out the extensive survey of rock-engravings by which he is best known. He shipped stones back to Cambridge. His herbarium of dried specimens was displayed at the Hanbury Institute, Genoa. He funded and stocked his own museum, the Museo Bicknell, in Bordighera.
This life, as Chippindale annotates it, was one of discreetly inflicted patronage, questing, categorising: true liberality – before the term became degraded. The busy leisure of a gentleman amateur of the best kind: rising at five a.m. to tend his garden, offering hospitality, walking the mountains, carrying out his obsessive logging of the marks on ancient rocks. ‘Casa Fontanalba’, his colonial chalet, was known as: ‘The Cottage at the Entrance to Paradise’.
Clarence Bicknell’s father, Elhanan, made his money in whale oil. Which meant epics of slaughter, boiling vats on Bugsby’s Marshes; bones and blubber. A heavy stench that drifted on the east wind. You can smell it still as you emerge from the Blackwall Tunnel to drive over the exhausted tongue of land on which the New Labour visionaries chose to erect their Millennium Dome.
Bicknell’s sperm oil lit the world, but Elhanan was also interested in another kind of oil, in paintings. And painters. Clarence’s mother, Lucinda (the third of Elhanan’s four wives), was the daughter of Hablot Knight Browne – who produced illustrations for Charles Dickens, under the pseudonym ‘Phiz’. Bicknell was comfortable with painters, as patron and as friend. His large house, in the rural suburb of Heme Hill, was close to the Ruskin property. Young John was a frequent visitor. Oils and watercolours by J.M.W. Turner dominated the Bicknell collection (which included works by Roberts, Etty, Landseer, De Wint). David Roberts was a relative. His daughter married one of Clarence’s half-brothers.
A private gallery for contemporary art in the Surrey foothills. Elhanan didn’t care for old masters. Turner, from whom he commissioned a number of works, was sketched by Landseer (and painted by Count d’Orsay) enjoying the hospitality of Herne Hill: Turner in Mr Bicknell’s Drawing Room. Player and gentleman. Turner’s Melvillean epic, Wlialers (of 1845), was produced with the sperm oil magnate in mind. And painted, this dark monster rearing from a red-gold sea, six years before the publication of Moby-Dick. Melville devoted three chapters to pictorial representations of whales: illusions, myths, truth. He tracked the story back to a crippled beggar on Tower Hill holding up a crudely daubed board which featured a primitive summary of ‘the tragic scene in which he lost his leg’. The whale narrative returns to Elhanan Bicknell, investor and collector – and to the London works, alongside the Thames, where he refined spermaceti.
When (in the 1840s) Turner wasn’t ‘at home’ in Queen Anne Street, he hadn’t necessarily slipped away to Mrs Booth at Margate; his other refuge was Herne Hill, with the Ruskins or the Bicknells. The Cockney lion wasn’t an easy guest, sometimes talking at length, charming the ladies with accounts of his sketching expeditions, sometimes mumpy and silent. With his host, Turner discussed the operation of the whaling industry, the source of that soft light that bathed the dinner table. Bicknell is thought to have commissioned all four of Turner’s whaling subjects.
The inevitable quarrel between artist and patron came over plans to engrave an edition of The Fighting Temeraire. Turner asked for fifty proofs, Bicknell offered eight. Taking an inventory of Whalers, inch by inch, as if reading a balance sheet, the Herne Hill entrepreneur discovered some fiddly detail he didn’t care for – and which he intemperately rubbed out ‘with Handky’. Turner, in a strop that could never be mended, was persuaded to make alterations.
They live with us, these phantoms. The collaboration between Turner and Elhanan Bicknell. Hunted whales and boiling vats on Greenwich peninsula. Definitions of the Light. Clarence, the youngest son, escaped from trade, from London, to become a rehearsal for Renchi: for the problem of finding the true path. Painting was a useful pursuit, a necessary irritant; never a profession. Questing walks. Generosity to friends and fellow townsmen. Vegetarianism. The urge to research, record. The karma of family wealth modestly dispersed – along with the difficulties (or guilts) associated with that process. The will towards good (that stumbles and blunders and is aware of its own absurdity). We repeat patterns that we can barely discern. We make old mistakes in new ways.
Clarence Bicknell, from his ‘Entrance to Paradise’, searched for pictures in the rocks. He sketched groups of horned figures: ‘Weapons and implements’. These implements, now interpreted as ‘halberds’, are characteristic of the early metal age in prehistoric Europe. Triangular blades set at a right angle to their shafts: they look like flags marking holes on motorway golf courses. Pin men dancing for joy: Conan Doyle’s The Dancing Men.
More significantly, Bicknell made a rubbing of ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. Here indeed was ‘The Highway to Heaven’ (the dream of a celestial autobahn). Here was the (unacknowledged) inspiration for the work Renchi produced when the M25 walk was completed. As part of a deprogramming process, he picked certain sites along the road as suitable for sand paintings, drawings with vegetable dye. In rehearsal, he sketched his designs in chalk on the road between the London Waste chimneys and Picketts Lock. The full ritual was intended for the tunnels at Epsom. Our orbital circuit was broken down into four vertical lines, like the Paradise ladders; chalk chippings were placed along one margin, small stones from a deleted burial ground along another. Drumming continued throughout the day, as Renchi laboured to complete his painting.
The Marc Atkins double portrait – Clarence and Renchi Bicknell – becomes a triptych with the addition of Clarence’s sketch of a 1909 discovery in the Mediterranean Alps: The Chief of the Tribes. After a day, during which they had endured intermittent heavy showers, Bicknell and his companion, ‘in a state of great excitement’, came upon something like a stone mirror: his own bearded image, thousands of years old, softened by lichen. ‘Le Sorcier’ was the title the French used. Bicknell spoke of’ Devil-dancers or Witch-doctors of savage tribes’. A beard, teeth suggested by a line of dots, intense eyes under a single horizontal bar (eyebrows or a lid to prise open the skull). The ‘horns’ on the head become hands, digits emphasised with chalk by future portraitists, determined to capture a clear representation. A human face. An archetype. As shocking in its immediacy as the mummified body of ‘Otzi the Ice-man’, who was recovered (clothing and weapons intact) from the snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border.
Renchi, in the booklet that collected the paintings from his Michael and Mary Dreaming, the walk to Land’s End, writes of: ‘Son following father/and father following son/a previous time of taller trees/and different animal energies.’ The son smuggles rocks into his father’s rucksack.
Clarence Bicknell travelled to Ceylon at around the time that my great-grandfather, Arthur, was botanising and managing tea plantations. Arthur did not come from a wealthy family. He reveals, in a chapbook (Arthur Sinclair: Planter and Visiting Agent in Ceylon: The Story of his Life and Times as Told by Himself) published in Colombo in 1900, that his parents ‘were descended from an old Jacobite stock, at this time still rather at a discount’. He walked to school from a ‘little farm-house at King Edward, Aberdeenshire’, carrying the day’s ration of peat. He didn’t linger. ‘I ended my schooling and began my education.’
A self-taught plantsman, he was taken up by Sir John Cheape and shipped off to tea estates near Kandy. He had already laid out a garden of his own, which he rose at four a.m. to work. He was a hungry reader. ‘I read indiscriminately every book in my father’s house… I read and re-read with intense delight.’ He walked home from Aberdeen, ‘sitting down by the wayside’ to dip into whatever he had scavenged from the book stalls. Thomas De Quincey ‘fascinated’ him, and was soon established as his favourite author.
From other books by Arthur Sinclair, accounts of his travels, I remember pen and ink sketches of flowers, more detailed, less painterly than Clarence Bicknell’s. There are photographs of plants, Chuncho chiefs in Peru, artefacts, skulls. Arthur, in his dug-out canoe, rifle across lap, is another Victorian beard. Another quirky traveller, roaming the globe, writing up journals, mythologising, making jokes.
Renchi and I won’t be scrambling over the Andes or discovering rare plants. We have to make do with a few shards of broken Roman pottery in a display case at the Clacket Lane Service Station, or the etymology of the woods we are skirting (‘Devil of Kent’).
Pilgrims Lane, when we blunder across it, is still a buzz. A hedger (human – not one of those grinding machines) puts us right; with his hook, he pulls back a curtain of greenery to gesture at a path across the fields. The road to Westerham dips once again under the M25.
Deep in a bramble thicket that erupts from the edge of the road, Renchi makes his discovery. An antique message printed on tin. Not quite ‘La Via Sacra’ or ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. A plain, shit-brown rectangle with a prancing white horse: KENT. Welcome.