To the River (15 page)

‘Is it not possible,’ Woolf asks earlier in the same piece, ‘that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence?’ It’s the same argument ghost hunters tender: that events are locked into the ground just as surely as gold coins lie buried there, invisible to the eye but emitting their own small disruptions to the magnetic field. There’s a hill outside Halland, a few miles east of where I stood, that’s still called Terrible Down, for the blood that was spilled there by Prince Edward’s men. By the Rainbow in Cooks-bridge, maybe a mile or so the other way, bodies are said to have been hung from the trees till they rotted, to warn of the cost of fighting a king. The brutality of it reminded me of one of the beliefs of the Albigensians, the heretical sect that Simon de Montfort’s father spent his life eradicating. They thought, among other strange things, that the God of the Old Testament was in fact the Devil, and that no punishment awaits us, for this world, where man is wolf to man, is hell already and shall not be repeated.

Simon de Montfort, though he favoured the russet clothes of the poor over the baronial red and wore anyway beneath them a close-fitting hair shirt to chafe away the sins of the flesh, was by no means a saint, for all that he was later proclaimed one. But if greed drove him, or the desire to elevate his own family, so too did a sense of basic justice. Listen, he speaks for himself: ‘The great men of the land bear me such ill-will because I uphold rights . . . of the poor against them.’ The picture of his end had imprinted itself on my mind. The blood came from his neck in flames, whelk-red, and also from his legs; when his son heard what had been done it is written that he could neither eat nor drink for days.

I weighed it up, his death, against a story Matthew Paris tells, that dates from just before the war took hold. The king was caught in a storm and forced to take shelter at the palace of the Bishop of Durham, where Simon was coincidentally also staying. Simon, knowing the king was afraid of storms, came to the steps to greet him and seeing his face blanched white asked why he was scared now the danger had passed. The king, Paris claims, answered: ‘The thunder and lightning I fear beyond measure, but by the Head of God, I fear thee more than all the thunder and lightning in the world.’ It was the earl’s reply that had stayed with me. ‘My lord it is unjust and incredible that you should fear me your firm friend, who am ever faithful to you and yours, and to the kingdom of England; it is your enemies, your destroyers, and false flatterers that you ought to fear.’

What drove him? Avarice? Arrogance? An unwillingness to break the vow he’d sworn in 1258, to uphold the Provisions
whatever others might do
? A case may be made for all of these things. Montfort did have a tendency – echoed three centuries on by Thomas Cromwell, the commoner who guided Henry Tudor through his break with Rome – to feather his nest, giving choice appointments to his family members and bringing domestic matters into what should perhaps have been purely political affairs. And yet he was also loyal and dogged, his word was his bond, and he possessed a clarity and independence of mind that would be rare in any time.

What is it about these men who check the king, that they must be torn into so many parts? When Thomas Cromwell, who resembled de Montfort in his vision, his arrogance and his acumen, fell out of favour with Henry VIII, he also suffered a bloody death. His head was cut off and boiled, and what remained of it was placed on a spike on London Bridge, turned emphatically away from the city he loved. And though Oliver Cromwell, who went to war against King Charles and won, died in his bed of what seems to have been septicaemia, his body was three years later disinterred and subjected to a posthumous execution. For months afterwards the stinking head was displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall, that building so loved by Henry III. No one need pity old Ironsides, but there is a peculiar savagery in this need to take a man to such pieces that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put back together what was broken again.

The light was getting to me. There was nothing to stop it. It came bowling down in strips and sheets and lifted in waves from the ground. At length I came to a farm that seemed to have been deserted in the centre of a great furrowed field. The barn stood open, and on the ground before it were ranked trays of rotting bedding plants, marigolds and begonias, their leaves as dry and discoloured as paper salvaged from a fire. The morning, which had started so well, had curdled and begun to sour. I felt I couldn’t walk another step, and yet I couldn’t bring myself to stop in that horrible, poisoned place. A harrow had drawn the flints to the surface, so that the field seemed bleached or drained. I began to count to a hundred over and again, and the green tips of the woodland stayed just out of reach until all of a sudden I was plunged within them, breathing the reek of dog shit and elder-blossom, the contaminated summer air.

The path crossed the village of Hamsey and then I was flung out again, onto the banks where the sun beat down. The river was tidal now, and the tide was on the ebb, stinking of salt and carrying clotted creamish foam and a waste of rotten thistles. It was running far faster than I’d seen it. You’d be a fool, I thought, to swim in these teeming waters. At Hamsey Island it churned the colour of molten chocolate and as I rounded the corner and saw Lewes a cormorant winged by. There were two boys fishing on the island, both with shaved heads and shell suit jackets. They had a net and as I passed by one called out in fury
I fucking nearly caught it
.

I was walking at the top of a grassy bank built to stop the river from flooding. The meadows below were edged by ditches that sprouted scrubby, waterlogged willows, their branches tipped with gold. It was here that the Londoners are said to have drowned, rushing from the heights onto ground that grew steadily quicker, shifting beneath their feet until it had them by the knee, the waist, until it had swallowed them up and marked where they lay with weeds, if it bothered to mark them at all. Much of this land was once underwater or on the verge of it, and even now it’s hard to track the little streams that dither hereabouts. Some have broken through where they’re not supposed to go, and a fisherman I once met claimed there are pike in even the narrowest ditches, though whether these are refugees from the last flood or proof that some channels are linked by underground waterways he’d not yet determined. He also told me about a bottomless pool in a wood he called the Pells, though that’s not the name it goes by on maps. Matthew and I went to find it last winter, with some friends who live nearby, and for a whole still afternoon we clattered through woods so deep and damp and sunk in upon themselves that though we were only feet from each other it seemed we might at any minute become hopelessly lost.

I went on in the sick heat up through the Landport estate, where England flags bloomed from car aerials and the windowsills of council houses. The children were still at school, and no one was out on the baking streets but a couple of ginger cats sprawled like corpses beneath a car. I slogged all the way to the edge of the Wallands, where the body of the battle had taken place. The roads here commemorate those who had fought, though the royalists seem to have come out best in the deal. Prince Edward’s Road and King Henry’s Road were lavishly lined with cherry and service trees. The houses were gabled Edwardian villas, their gingerbread porches swagged with heaps of coloured roses. Queen Eleanor hadn’t done so well as one might expect from a woman who once smuggled the Crown Jewels to France. Eleanor Close was a dead end full of stubby purpose-built flats that looked out from small windows to the river beneath. As for De Montfort Road, it swooped from the Paddock to Lewes Prison, where the fiercest fighting probably took place. This theory was first advanced by the historian William Blaauw, who heard from a road-maker that when the Brighton turnpike was being lowered in 1810 three great pits of bones were found in the vicinity of the prison, each holding
quite five hundred bodies
.

By the time I reached the High Street tiny flares were going off in the corners of my vision and all I wanted was to stand for a year beneath a cold shower and wash the river from my skin. The White Hart was a broad, sprawling building opposite the castle, with pretty carriage lamps and a neat wrought-iron balcony, a façade that can’t have changed much since the Woolfs bought Monks House at auction here in 1919. The lobby was even hotter than it had been outdoors, and smelled powerfully of boiled beef. My room was up in the eaves and from each of the high windows I could see martins lifting and falling like sifted flour. There was an odd hall or vestibule just inside the doorway, empty except for a locked chest that looked big enough to hide a body. The carpet was the colour of stewed damsons and so too were the curtains and chair, which was upholstered in a fabric that looked like velvet and emitted little ripples of static each time I brushed against it. Someone had stubbed a cigarette out on one of the arms. I was amazed it hadn’t burned the place down. Someone else – or perhaps it was the same person – seemed to have kicked a great chunk of plaster from the wall, exposing a crumble of flint and concrete that was festooned in cobwebs.

It felt as if my blood had turned to mercury. I lay on the bed almost weeping, suddenly overwhelmed by the past few months. I hadn’t thought I was running away, but now all I wanted was to turn tail and fly, back into the woods, the dense, enchanted Andredesleage where no one could find me or knew my name. Why does the past do this? Why does it linger instead of receding? Why does it return with such a force sometimes that the real place in which one stands or sits or lies, the place in which one’s corporeal body most undeniably exists, dissolves as if it were nothing more than a mirage? The past cannot be grasped; it is not possible to return in time, to regather what was lost or carelessly shrugged off, so why these sudden ambushes, these flourishes of memory?

I’d been here before. Not the room, but the restaurant downstairs. We’d come almost a decade ago, Matthew and I, in midwinter, those dead weeks at the beginning of the year. It had snowed, or was just about to – see, already memory lets me down – and we drank house red in a room that smelled, then as now, of boiled beef, the warm air billowing from a concealed kitchen. I don’t remember what we ate. I know that I, half-consciously, kept laying my hands on the table, wrists upturned. We hadn’t yet touched, and as we left I caught the smell of chlorine from a pool concealed in the basement. We were entirely blind. We didn’t know what lay ahead. So yes, I understand why the island of the sirens is piled high with bodies. If any one of us knew what the future held, I think we too would sit there, petrified, until the hide rotted from our bones.

In her unfinished memoir,
A Sketch of the Past
, Virginia Woolf turns again and again to the question of how one can make sense of what has gone before. This document – part diary, part autobiography – was begun on 18 April 1939 and added to spasmodically over the next year and a half, the last entry written on 15 November 1940, four months before she died. It eddies musingly through her early life, beginning with the gleeful free-range summers at St Ives and bowling on into the claustrophobic years of mourning that followed the deaths of her mother, Julia, and her half-sister Stella, when her father’s grief made him a tyrant prone to periodic and horribly childish rages. As he grew more deaf and isolated, greedy, chubby George Duckworth, Stella’s brother, rose to take his place, bullying Virginia and her sister Vanessa through a round of balls and parties as humiliating as they were dull.

Towards the end of this long, fragmentary, intensely vivid skein of writing – in fact a series of faintly different and contradictory drafts, one of which tumbled into a wastepaper basket and was rescued only by chance – the figure of Thoby, her elder brother, drifts into view. He is tilling a boat, his eyes blue with concentration. He is standing upright in a Norfolk jacket too short in the arm and too narrow across the shoulders. He is drawing a bird, holding the paper easily and starting at some unexpected corner of the page. He is . . . but here the well of memories runs dry. Thoby died of typhoid in 1906, an event Woolf alludes to but never quite arrives at chronicling.

Instead, she turns to imagining how Thoby might have turned out, concluding: ‘He would have been more of a character than a success, I suppose; had he been put on.’ The words seem to jolt her. She goes on cautiously; her pen is, as she once put it, on the scent. ‘The knell of those words affect my memory of a time when in fact they were not heard at all. We had no foreboding that he was to die when he was twenty-six and I was twenty-four. This is one of the falsifications – that knell I always find myself hearing and transmitting – that one cannot guard against, save by noting it.’ Earlier, she observed that ‘the past is much affected by the present moment’. Now, for a brief instant, grasping it at all seems an impossibility, since it is irrevocably altered by the present, the platform of time from which it’s glimpsed.

This piece of writing is, as I have said, fragmentary. It was written when bombs were falling on Sussex: at one point Woolf begins a section by noting ‘London battered last night.’ Her childhood world and the ghosts that populate it seem very distant, and yet what she discovers as she delves gropingly backward in time is surprising:

In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else . . . I write this partly in order to recover my sense of the present by getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then, like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.

It echoes what she concluded in
Between the Acts
, which was written contemporaneously and also to the accompaniment of falling bombs: that one can only make sense of the violent – the violating – present by looking back, to what has disappeared from view.