The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (40 page)

Word is that the push approaches. Thomas is keen to have a share in the great strafe when it comes. By mid-March, his guns are firing between 400 and 600 rounds a day, mostly at Vimy Ridge. He sights off targets and shell-fall using a lensatic compass, whose degree-plate tipples in the liquid of the instrument’s dial.

On 24 March, Thomas goes out to an advance position on the front line at Beaurains. My ‘
new position, fancy
, was an old chalk pit in which a young copse of birch, hazel etc. has established itself’, he writes to Helen that day. ‘I am sitting warm in the sun on a heap of chalk with my back to the wall of the pit. Fancy, an old chalk pit with moss and even a rabbit left in spite of the paths trodden all over it. It is beautiful and sunny and warm though cold in the shade. The chalk is dazzling. The sallow catkins are soft dark white …’

Late March and early April brings a run of clear serene winter mornings, and preparations for the spring offensive. The larks start singing at 5.15 a.m., the blackbirds follow at 6 a.m., the guns shortly afterwards. Thomas and his men fill sandbags for reinforcing their dugouts, readying for battle. Rubin and Smith, the two men with the best voices, sing duets from
The Bing Boys
. Thomas reads
Macbeth
.

Helen writes to an old friend, Janet Hooton – wife of Harry, the man to whom Thomas had dedicated
The Icknield Way
. He’s still the poet, even out there, Helen tells Janet proudly, ‘
delighting in what beauty
there is there, and he finds beauty where no one else would find it … My eyes and ears and hands long for him, and nearly every night I dream he has come and we are together once again.’

On 4 April they fire all day, 600 rounds dispatched, though almost nothing comes back in return. The artillery makes the air flap, a noise like that of loose sails in a gusty wind. Thomas’s feet are constantly wet and cold. Fine green feathers of yarrow fletch the sods on the forward dugout. He reads
Hamlet
.

On the weekend of 7 and 8 April, they line up the heavy guns of the battery out on the old sunken road that runs parallel to the front. The German bombardment is unusually heavy. He composes a letter to Helen:

Dearest

Here I am in my valise on the floor of my dugout writing before sleeping. The artillery is like a stormy tide breaking on the shores of the full moon … The pretty village among trees that I first saw two weeks ago is now just ruins among violated stark tree trunks. But the sun shone and larks and partridge and magpies and hedgesparrows made love and the trench was being made passage for the wounded that will be harvested in a day or two …

I slept jolly well and now it is sunshine and wind and we are in for a long day and I must post this when I can.

All and always yours Edwy

The gramophone plays ‘Death of the Troll’.

Easter Monday, 9 April, the first day of the Battle of Arras, begins with a massive artillery barrage from the British – the hurricane bombardment. The air sags and beats with shell-rip. Thomas is in his observation post, watching the shell-fall, directing fire. In the wintry dawn light, behind the creeping barrage, the first waves of troops advance on the German lines.

The morning is a triumph for the British batteries. They disable most of the German heavy guns with their counter-battery fire, and their troops take the German infantry unawares. As the guns slow their fire the British soldiers emerge to shout and dance.

Thomas steps out of the dugout and then leans back into the doorway, to fill and light his clay pipe. Snow and red sun; a ridge sweeping away bare for miles. He has part filled the pipe when a stray German shell drops near him and the vacuum caused by its passing throws him hard to the earth.

His body is unwounded. Beside him lies his clay pipe, unbroken. He has been killed by a pneumatic concussion, his heart stopped still by a violent absence of air. The fatal vacuum has created pressure ridges on the pages of his diary, which resemble ripples in standing water.

Helen is sewing and Myfanwy is sitting nearby, filling in the pricked dots on a postcard with coloured wool, making a wild duck to send to her father in France. Out of the window, Helen sees the telegraph boy stop on his bicycle and lean it against the fence. He hands the telegram over. She reads it in silence. He waits to see if a reply is wanted. ‘No answer,’ she says.

Helen writes to Frost. She cannot tell which tense to use. ‘
For a moment indeed
one loses sight and feeling. With him too all was well and is. You love him, and some day I hope we may meet and talk of him for he is very great and splendid.’

The contents of Thomas’s pockets are returned to Helen in a box. There is the diary, and inside it a photograph, a loose slip of paper and a creased letter. The letter is from her to him. The photograph is of her. The slip of paper has addresses and names written on one side, and on the other, three jotted lines in pencil:

Where any turn may lead
to Heaven

Or any corner may hide Hell

Roads shining like river up hill after rain.

What was Thomas seeing as he wrote those last verses in his Arras notebook? The old ways of the South Country, or the shell-swept support roads that wound to the front? Both, perhaps, folded together, the one kind of path having led in its way to the other.

16

Print

Footprints in the mud: two sets of prints, walking northwards. A man and a woman, companionably close, moving together, shore-parallel, at around four miles per hour: journeying, not foraging. This much we know: that the man was around 6' 3" tall, and the woman just under a foot shorter. That the man had a sharp big toenail; that the woman had raised arches. That on the day of their journey, some 5,000 summers ago, the sun was bakingly hot, the wind was light and the waves were low. That red deer and roe deer were also out, moving over the intertidal silts, leaving their crisp slots. And that children were there too, a group of children, playing together, mud-larking, making a gaggle of small footprints.

I set my foot by the side of the first print of the man, and then I walk north, keeping pace, and stride with him as he goes, falling into step. Squalls of rain and sun are pushing across the coast. There are rapid tilts of the light. A double rainbow hoops over the sea to the north. White blades are spinning on the wind turbines in the estuary. Far out west, over the Irish Sea, a huge cumulonimbus evolves.

The prehistoric footprint trail appeared a few miles north of Liverpool, on a stretch of coastline known as Formby Point, where the land has preserved what is surely one of the most remarkable archives ever kept.
Seven thousand to five thousand years ago
, this region was a serrated coastline, cut through by drainage channels and fingers of inlet. Then, as now, a dune barrier had built up, creating an intermittent freshwater–saltwater barrier. Inland of the dunes was a fen
carr
of alder, birch, willow and scrub oak. A reed-fringed shallow lagoon existed in the intertidal zone, and the foreshore was firm silt. It was a rich territory of mixed habitats, and for this reason it supported a significant population of birds, animals and humans.

When people or creatures traversed the foreshore, they left their tracks pressed into the silt. Over the course of a day – if the sun were strong enough – the silt hardened in the heat, and the tracks were set. Fine sand, blown from the nearby dunes, then filled or coated the imprints. When the tide came in – if it were gentle enough – those sun-hardened, sand-filled tracks were capped with mud. And that set of tracks was compressed as new layers of silt built over it, each of which might – if the conditions were right – also keep a record of passage. In this way, over the course of centuries, thousands of footprint trails were preserved, laid down in the stacked silt strata like a growing pile of pages.

At some point towards the end of the Neolithic period, the coastline began to grow out westwards. First the near-shore silts were covered, then the intertidal lagoon, then the offshore sandbars. The footprints were safely buried beneath this new land. Much later, in the early eighteenth century, vast sandstorms inundated the region, forcing the abandonment of a village and further burying the footprints under dunes. More recently, however, coastal erosion started to bite into the middle of Formby Point. It’s here that the underlying Mesolithic and Neolithic silt layers containing the footprints are being uncovered – and then rapidly stripped away.

Presently, when big tides surge at neap or spring, or when a storm blows in from the Irish Sea, the topmost stratum of silt is scoured off to reveal its
infaunal
predecessor. The sea is reversing the flow of history, lifting pages from the pile of paper, so that even as time moves forwards day by day it also moves backwards year by year. When the sea recedes, a fresh silt surface is exposed – and sometimes this surface will carry the marks of prehistoric foot-journeys. The prints are legible again only for a few days or even a few hours. Each newly revealed layer survives only until the next strong tide or storm, when it in turn is lifted off to uncover the one beneath.

I walk on northwards stride for stride with the man, who is now passing along the shelving edge of a mud-flat. Where the mud-flat angles down to standing water, it resembles the
deckled
pages of a book. I can see the individual strata of plump brown silt, each an inch or so thick. There are now lines of red-deer and roe-deer prints, the roe-deer hooves sharp and tiny, those of the red deer like big quotation marks. The man keeps walking, and I keep pace.

The Formby silts have yielded an astonishing variety of tracks. The 5,000-year-old prints of wild boar, wolves and dogs have been revealed, as well as those of goats, horses, and red deer whose hooves were up to five inches long – almost twice the size of today’s biggest red deer. The potterings of oystercatchers (little wandering tracks, like lines of arrowheads) have emerged, the splay-toed T-prints of a crane padding along with her chicks, and the plate-sized hoof-marks of the aurochs – the giant ungulates that were hunted into extinction in Britain during the Bronze Age, and images of which are painted on the cave walls at Lascaux. A big bull aurochs measured six feet at the withers and eleven feet from muzzle to rump.

Hundreds of human footprint trails have also emerged. Some of these prints have been so crisp that archaeologists have been able to infer the stature, velocity, cadence and speed of the individuals who made them. Most of the walkers were women and children, padding barefoot over the sandy silts, probably engaged in gathering food: shrimps and razor shells from the sand-flats and pools, and birds’ eggs from the shoreline lagoons and creeks. One of them was an adolescent female, possibly pregnant, whose curled toes indicate she may have been finding grip difficult on the slippery ground. Male footprints have been discovered following red- and roe-deer tracks, with deeper imprints and a purposeful line suggesting that the men were running, presumably hunting.

Step for step northwards, keeping to his trail, the wind like a hand in the small of the back, pushing us on. The strong southerly is raising spindrift from the dry sand, long golden snakes that flow loosely across the dunes and through the marram.

The Formby prints are so evocative because they record specific journeys, and they are so mysterious because we know so little of the walkers who left them. Like the daubed handprints on the cave walls at Lascaux, they are the marks of exact and unrepeatable acts – the skin of that palm or this sole was pressed to this cave wall or that beach on this occasion – and in their shape and spacing they remind us of a kinship of motion that stretches back as far as 3.6 million years ago. Other than that, almost nothing is known. Who made these marks that are so particular and so generic? What were they feeling as they left them, in the same centuries that the first pictograms were pressed into Mesopotamian clay with a reed stylus?

To track these tracks, to leave your own prints beside them, is to sense nothing so simple as time travel, a sudden whisking back to the Mesolithic. No, the uncanniness of the experience involves a feeling of co-presence: the prehistoric and the present matching up such that it is unclear who walks in whose tracks. It’s this combination of intimacy and remoteness that gives these trails their unsettling power. They are among the earliest texts, from a period of history devoid of recorded narrative. Following them, we are reading one of the earliest stories, told not in print but in footprint.