A WINTER BEACH is a good place for seeing clearly. Last week, I went for a walk at Covehithe in Suffolk with the writer Julia Blackburn, who had just finished her new book, Time Song, about Doggerland. Doggerland was the land that once connected England to Continental Europe, before it was lost beneath rising seas around 6500 years BC. It had been right there, under the waves that rose and slapped six feet to our left. People lived there, hunted animals, dropped tools that were sometimes recovered by fishermen or washed up on the tide. Sea levels were rising again, and as the Covehithe cliffs eroded in storms, Mesolithic fossils were exposed once again to the light.
It was a very bright day. The sun was so low that every grain of sand cast a shadow. I pointed at a rust-stained piece of wood. Julia squinted, scooped. What she had in her hands wasn’t wood at all, but a fossilised jawbone. Dolphin, she said, maybe whale, probably the oldest thing I’ve ever touched.
In the era of border walls and Brexit, I find the existence of Doggerland soothing to contemplate: a corrective to triumphalist ‘our island story’ nationalism. I was sure I’d read about it somewhere before, and eventually I tracked it down as a repeating image in Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, which was written at another turning point in history, just as Britain was entering the Second World War.
Woolf had the idea for Between the Acts in 1938 and finished writing it in 1940, as bombers flew overhead. She was still working on revisions when she committed suicide in 1941. It’s set over twenty-four hours in June 1939, as the uneasy peace threatens to give way to war. The novel is about people talking and the gaps between words, about violent change and abiding continuity. It takes place in a country house where a pageant is being performed, and it’s an attempt to situate what Woolf feared might be an end of civilisation itself in a sustained vision of deep time, in which English history and pre-history is constantly rehearsed.
More than one of the characters in Between the Acts has been reading about Doggerland. The knowledge undermines the Channel, which has begun to feel like a weak defence anyway now war has entered the air. But it also provides consolations. Time keeps washing on. What is now Piccadilly was once a rhododendron forest, populated ‘by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend.’ Continuation is a comfort; life of some sort is surely assured.
The day after we found the jawbone, I went to see the English National Opera staging of Benjamin Britten’s 1962 War Requiem at the Coliseum. Britten, a pacifist like Woolf, had lived a few miles down the Suffolk coast from Covehithe, in the fishing village of Aldeburgh. He’d written the War Requiem for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built to replace the fourteenth-century cathedral destroyed in a bombing raid code-named Operation Mondscheinsonate or Moonlight Sonata, on the night of 14 November 1940. ‘Coventry almost destroyed,’ Woolf wrote in her diary the morning after the raid, before starting the day’s work on Between the Acts. ‘When I am not writing fiction this fact seeps in.’
This fact seeped in at the Coliseum too. The set was designed by Wolfgang Tillmans. Behind the singers, a giant photograph of Coventry Cathedral. Zoom, broken columns. Zoom, stone. Zoom, moss. Zoom, until the filaments towered over the singers’ heads, a sinister forest. Something continues, something grows. Is this comfort or terror, Woolf frets. What consolation can you wring from the lowing cows, the returning flurries of swallows, ‘when the whole of Europe – over there – was bristling like . . . He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word “hedgehog” illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens.’
Woolf finished Between the Acts eight days after Coventry Cathedral was bombed. In the same entry in which she noted this fact, she described how a German plane had been shot down in the hills behind her house and how the local people ‘stomped’ on the heads of the dead airmen. Love, hate, peace, she wrote in Between the Acts, the three great elements of human existence. On the screens at the Coliseum more images appeared. Football hooligans, Srebrenica, the deformed face of a soldier, his jaw obliterated.