To the River (29 page)

These sound like cheerless thoughts, but they filled me with a strange exhilaration.
Nothing matters
, Leonard used to say, and then again,
everything matters
. Down in the riverbed, in this territory of vanishings, I might have been at loose in any time. The things that survived here did so against all odds, blooming into the teeth of the wind, amid the shifting beds of shingle. The plants rose from the stones like a conjurer’s trick, working roots down into hidden pockets of sabulous soil: white and gold stonecrops with their flowers like stars; the spiked leaves and overblown petals of yellow horned poppy; great outcrops of sea kelp, the leaves whittled into extraordinary shapes by the relentless churnings of the air.

I crunched an apple as I strolled along. There wasn’t a soul in sight, though I knew there were hordes of people beyond each ridge. I didn’t want to go home, it was true, but I was nonetheless as purely happy as I’ve ever been right then, in that open passageway beneath the blue vault of sky, walking the measure allotted me, with winter on each side. There was a caravan park ahead, on the lee of one of the hills that rose above Seaford. The town was coming; there was no escaping it, and still I walked as if in a dream, among the larks and the valerian. I felt untethered, almost weightless, which is a consequence sometimes of swimming in the more buoyant waters of the sea. But it wasn’t just that. I had the sense I’d fallen into some other world, adjacent to our own, and though I would at any moment be pitched back, I thought I might have grasped the knack of slipping to and fro. It struck me as funny then that I was walking at the grassy bottom of the old Ouse, and since no one could see me there’s no one to say that I didn’t turn at the last a few gay steps of a waltz, like the little people in Cherry of Zennor who danced their hearts out beneath the stream.

The path officially ended by the yacht club. An old couple were sitting on a bench there, watching the tide as it inched inexorably in. I greeted them and the man said
You’re striding out faster than I could
and I wanted to say I’ve walked the whole river from beginning to end but I didn’t, I smiled and I thought how friendly people were, when you met them as a stranger with a pack on your back. The thought of food was still propelling me and I went on up the esplanade to the edge of town. The beach was full of people swimming and fishing, a wall of pink and white bodies that ran all the way to Seaford Head. The heat was making my head spin, and my skin was crusted with salt. There were no cafés, though I walked on much further than I had planned. In the end I gave it up and bought a Mr Whippy that tasted faintly of strawberries and powerfully of vegetable fat. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, except a handful of oatcake crumbs and the apple, and I wondered as I licked it if this was the corollary to the pomegranate seeds that Hades spooned into Persephone’s mouth, the food that would entrap me in the mortal realm. It had happened to Cherry, had it not, whose story ended with the words:
The sun rose, and there was Cherry seated on a granite stone, without a soul within miles of her. She cried until she was tired, and then she went home to Zennor, where they thought she was her own ghost returned.

I climbed the steps to Bishopstone station just as the train to Brighton pulled in. There was no time to acclimatise. It was over. I was going home. I rested my head against the glass, looking out at the land I’d passed so slowly through. In the seat behind me a man with a puffy, sulky face was talking on a mobile phone.
I’ll text you Parky’s number
, he said.
Yes, I know Laurence, he went to Eton
. Outside the Downs had disappeared, obliterated by a swelling wall of thunderheads. The cloud was growing as I watched, banking up into headwalls and cornices and deep ice-blue gullies. It looked like the aftermath of an explosion, like the world beyond the hills had been bombed to smithereens. But that’s how we go, is it not, between nothing and nothing, along this strip of life, where the ragworts nod in the repeating breeze?
Like a little strip of pavement above an abyss
, Virginia Woolf once said. And if she’s right, then the only home we’ll ever have is here. This is it, this spoiled earth. We crossed the river then and pulled away, and in the empty fields the lark still spilled its praise.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T
HOUGH IN THE MAIN BOOKS
have been organised according to the chapter in which they first appear, all background material referring to Virginia Woolf that isn’t directly quoted in the text is, for the sake of coherence, listed under Chapter VI.

I CLEARING OUT

Conrad, Joseph,
Heart of Darkness
(Penguin, 1973, first published 1902)

Miłosz, Czeslaw,
New and Collected Poems 1931–2001
(Penguin, 2005)

Woolf, Virginia,
The Diary of Virginia Woolf
eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Nigel Nicolson, 5 vols (Hogarth Press, 1978–84)

–––
The Letters of Virginia Woolf
ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman, 6 vols (Hogarth Press, 1975–80)

II AT THE SOURCE

Anderson, Lorraine, ed.,
Sisters of the Earth
(Vintage, 1991)

Auden, W.H.,
Selected Poems
(Vintage, 1990)

Brook, Tony, ‘The End of Mantell’s Spine’, in
Newsletter of the History of Geology Group of the Geological Society of London,
number 31, September 2007

Cadbury, Deborah,
The Dinosaur Hunters
(Fourth Estate, 2000)

Camden, William,
Camden’s Britannia
, annotated and ed. Gordon J. Copley (Hutchinson, 1977, from the edition of 1789)

Cleere, Henry and Crossley, David,
The Iron Industry of the Weald
(Merton Priory Press, 1995, first published 1985)

Dealny, Mary Cecilia,
The Historical Geography of the Wealden Iron Industry
(Benn Brothers Ltd, 1921)

Edmonds, William,
The Iguanodon Mystery
(Kestrel Books, 1979)

Fitter, Richard, Fitter, Alastair and Blamey, Marjorie,
Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe
(Collins, 1996, first published 1974)

Heaney, Seamus,
Selected Poems
(Faber, 1980)

Jarman, Derek,
Modern Nature
(Vintage, 1992)

–––
The Garden
(Thames & Hudson, 1995)

Jeffrey, David L.,
A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature
(Ethics & Public Policy Center, 1996)

Jenkins, Rhys,
The Rise and Fall of the Sussex Iron Industry
(transcript of a talk read at the Iron and Steel Institute, Westminster, on 27 January 1921)

Jones, David K. C., ed.,
The Shaping of Southern England
(Academic Press, 1980)

Lloyd-Taylor, Arthur,
Wealden Iron and Worth
(1972, for private circulation)

Mantell, Gideon,
The Journal of Gideon Mantell
, ed. with an introduction and notes by E. Cecil Curwen (Oxford University Press, 1940)

McCarthy, Edna and ‘Mac’,
Sussex River: Journeys along the banks of the River Ouse: Seaford to Newhaven
(Lindel Organisation Ltd, 1975)

–––
Sussex River: Journeys along the banks of the River Ouse: Newhaven to Lewes
(Lindel Organisation Ltd, 1977)

–––
Sussex River: Upstream from Lewes to the Sources
(Lindel Organisation Ltd, 1979)

Owen, Terry and Anderson, Peter,
The Sussex Ouse Valley Way
(Per-Rambulations, 2005)

Parish, Reverend W.D.,
A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect
(Snake River Press, 2008, first published 1875)

Rose, Martial, ed.,
The Wakefield Mystery Plays
(Norton, 1969)

Willard, Barbara,
Sussex
(Batsford, 1965)

Wooldridge, S. W. and Goldring, Frederick,
The Weald
(Collins, 1972, first published 1953)

Woolf, Virginia,
Between the Acts
(Penguin, 2000, first published Hogarth Press, 1941)

III GOING UNDER

Anon, ‘Tom the Rhymer’, in
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads Volume I
, collected by James Child (Houghton Mifflin, 1882)

Apuleius,
The Golden Ass
, trans. Robert Graves (Penguin, 1958)

Bede,
A History of the English Church and People
, trans. Leo Shirley-Price (Penguin, 1975, first published 1955)

–––
Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People
, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford University Press, 1991)

Byatt, A.S.,
The Children’s Book
(Chatto & Windus, 2009)

Biggam, C. P., ‘Whelk dyes and pigments in Anglo Saxon England’, in
Anglo Saxon England
, vol. 35 (Cambridge University Press, 2006)

Brennan, Teresa and Jay, Martin, eds,
Vision in Context
(Routledge, 1996)

Cawley, A. C., ed.,
Everyman and Medieval Miracle Plays
(Everyman, 1993, first published 1956)

Dante,
The Divine Comedy: Hell
, trans. Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin, 1949, republished 1957)

Ehrlich, Paul, Dobkin, David and Wheye, Darryl,
The Birder’s Handbook
(Simon & Schuster, 1988)

Grahame, Kenneth,
Pagan Papers
(General Books, 2009, first published 1893)

–––
The Golden Age
(Aegypan Press, 2010, first published 1895)

–––
The Wind in the Willows
(Egmont, 2006, first published 1908)

Graves, Robert,
Greek Myths
, 2 vols (Penguin, 1957)

Hékinian, Roger, Stoffers, Peter and Cheminée, Jean-Louis,
Oceanic Hotspots: intraplate submarine magmatism and tectonism
(Springer, 2004)

Henderson, George,
Vision and Image in Early Christian England
(Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Homer,
The Odyssey
, trans. S.H. Butcher and A. Lang (Macmillan, 1887)

Jeffries, Richard,
Landscape with Figures: An Anthology of Richard Jeffries’s Prose
, ed. Richard Mabey (Penguin, 1983)

Prince, Alison,
An Innocent in the Wild Wood
(Allison & Busby, 1996)

Ramachandran, Vilayanur S. and Rogers-Ramachandran, Diane, ‘How Blind Are We?’
Scientific American Mind
(June 2005)

Stace, Colin,
New Flora of the British Isles
(Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Thomas, Edward,
One Green Field
(Penguin, 2009, first published 1906 as
The Heart of England
)

Thompson, A.H., ed.,
Bede: His life, times and writing
(Oxford University Press, 1935)

Virgil,
The Aeneid,
trans. Frederick Ahl (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008)

Woolf, Virginia,
A Room of One’s Own
(Flamingo, 1994, first published Hogarth Press, 1929)

–––
The Common Reader
(Penguin, 1992, first published Hogarth Press, 1925)

IV WAKE

Adams, Tim, ‘Marriage made in heaven’, in the
Observer
(18 March 2001)

Amis, Martin, ‘Age Will Win’, in the
Guardian
(21 December 1991)

Bayley, John,
Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch
(Duckworth, 1998)

Beamish, Tufton,
Battle Royal
(Frederick Muller, 1965)

Blaauw, W.H.,
The Barons’ War
(Nicholls & Son, 1844)

Carpenter, David,
The Battles of Lewes & Evesham 1264/65
(Mercia Publications, 1987)

Conradi, Peter J.,
Iris
(HarperCollins, 2001)

Fleming, Barbara,
The Battle of Lewes 1264
(J&KH Publishing, 1999)

Labarge, Margaret Wade,
Simon de Montfort
(Cedric Chilvers, 1962)

Maddicott, J. R.,
Simon de Montfort
(Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Murdoch, Iris,
The Sea, The Sea
(Vintage, 1999, first published Chatto, 1978)

Paris, Matthew,
Chronicles of Matthew Paris,
trans. Richard Vaughan (Sutton, 1984)

Powicke, Sir Maurice, Treharne, R. F. and Lemmon, Lt. Colonel Charles H.,
The Battle of Lewes 1264: its place in English history
(published by the Friends of Lewes Society, 1964)

Sadler, John,
The Second Barons’ War
(Pen & Sword, 2008)

Segal, J., ‘Kleos and its Ironies’, in
Reading the Odyssey,
ed. Seth L. Schein (Princeton University Press, 1996)

Turk, Tony,
A Victorian Diary of Newick 1875–1899
(Tony Turk, 1999)

Vaughan, Richard,
Chronicles of Matthew Paris
(Alan Sutton, 1984)

Waley Daniel, ‘Simon de Montfort and the historians’,
Sussex Archaeological Collections 140
(Sussex Archaeological Society, 2002)

Woolf, Virginia,
Moments of Being,
ed. Jeanne Schulkind (Pimlico, 2002, first published Sussex University Press, 1976)

V IN THE FLOOD

Anon,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
trans. James Ingram (Echo Library, 2007, first published 1823)

Brandon, P. F., ‘The Origin of Newhaven and the Drainage of the Lewes and Laughton Levels’,
Sussex Archaeological Collections CIX
(Sussex Archaeological Society, 1971)

Brandon, Peter, ed.,
The South Saxons
(Phillimore 1978)

Brandon, Peter and Short, Brian,
The South East from AD 1000
(Longman, 1990)

Brook, Anthony, ed.,
What on Earth is under Sussex?: A Series of Essays Exploring the History of Geology in Sussex (Journal of West Sussex History 77,
2009)

Browne, Thomas,
Hydrotaphia and the Garden of Cyrus,
ed. W. A. Greenhill (Macmillan, 1929, first published 1895)

Cavafy C. P.,
The Collected Poems,
trans. Evangelos Sachperoglou (Oxford University Press, 2007)