Of course, Watkins got it wrong. Alfred. Probably
another initial, too. The Old Straight Track. 1923, I think, but based
on stuff he’d seen and thought years and years before. Probably been walking
around that area the same time as Kilvert. Which area? Radnorshire. Doesn’t
exist any more. Well, of course it DOES. It’s not like Dunwich, is it? Can’t
have dropped into the sea. I mean, bits of the Welsh Marches don’t just VANISH,
do they? Do they? No, I didn’t think so. Seems that way when you’re driving
through them, though. Actually, if you’re trying to get anywhere else, it’s the
opposite effect: there seems to be a lot more landscape than you bargained for
when you looked at the map. Probably the curves. Measure the distance you think
you’re going to have to travel, multiply it by pi over two, and you’ll have the
answer – plus the bits where you have to reverse to let the tractor go by, or
drive back five miles to the turn you missed.
The frustrating thing, of course, is that you can
see the place you’re trying to get to – or at least you think you can. The
direction’s right, judging by where the sun is and the time of day, and it
seems the correct sort of distance away, and what you can actually see of it is
the most prominent landmark, which is usually the church tower or the spire, so
you have a sort of check on whether it is the right place, according to
the symbol on the map. Sometimes there’s a prominent hill, with a hill-fort,
and they’re pretty unmistakable – unless there’s a lot of them in the area,
which happens sometimes.
As I say: you can see it in the distance. But
getting there is quite another matter. Bit like life, really. Or the second
phase of the campaign in Normandy. The objective was all very clear, and so was
the starting-point. But nobody’d said a word about the terrain in between.
Small square fields with tough stone walls, and narrow lanes in between.
Snipers’ paradise. You knew very well what was round the next corner – another
corner. And another one after that. And so on.
So you can understand how Watkins gave in to that
tempting delusion: that there was, once, an old straight track, a network of
them, in fact, that linked everything with everything. All you had to do was be
in the right place, at the right time, looking in the right direction, and
you’d see them all.
Yes. So far, so good. You’d see them all. The
problems come when you try to follow them. Sometimes it’s called having a
career. Of course, the other meaning of “career” is “running along wildly,
out of control.” Wonderful thing, language. Tells the truth all the time,
especially when you’re trying to force it not to. Do you ever read party
political manifestoes? Don’t bother.
You can tell I’m starting a story, can’t you?
Indeed, for all you know, I may be already halfway through it. At the moment,
it doesn’t look much like a story. But have faith. It will do from the other
end.
You’ll have guessed that I saw something. Something
that I didn’t expect to see, where I should have seen something that I expected
to see. The question is: what? Actually, that question is quite easy to answer.
But the answer is not particularly helpful or informative. The things I saw
were, of themselves, quite ordinary, though not, perhaps, everyday. Not exactly
uncommon, though.
The real question is not what I saw, but when
I saw. Again, the answer to that question seems to be quite easy. The dogs wake
me according to the level of light. It’s as if they’re insisting that I make
the fullest possible use of every day. Dogs came into my life quite late. Are
they insisting because they know something that I don’t? Or do they just want
to get the freshness of the morning smells, and wipe the copious dewfall off
the grass into every fibre of their increasingly matted coats? (There ought to
be some etymological relationship between spaniel and sponge to
match the practical one. Have you ever wrung out a dog’s legs? A wineglassful
each!)
As I walk along the top of the ridge on the side of
the valley opposite to my house, which is on a small, quite tasteful estate
that I’m sure the village must have resented bitterly thirty years ago, I can
look across to where I live. There are trees and hedges in the way, of course,
but there are also enough gaps of one kind or another to permit me to pick out
my own dwelling, especially because I live next to the only house whose bricks
have been painted – cream, flaking, lichen-spotted (thanks to the clear country
air), but a useful landmark, otherwise I might have no distinguishing feature
to tell my little box from all the others. (The English demand external
conformism – inside, you can be as crazy as you like. That’s how Watkins got
away with it – and how he found adherents, among people who liked walking in
the countryside – and hated having to read maps! What, after all, can be more
normal than that?)
In the very early morning, then, I have a view of
the street where I live. It is a street. It has houses on both sides,
and it doesn’t go anywhere in particular. It runs parallel to the narrow road
through the village, coming off it and returning to it, after it has granted
access to the estate’s little honeycomb of crescents, closes and cul-de-sacs.
In terms of distance, I am not particularly far away
from it. Ten minutes at most, as the spaniel pulls. But can I actually equate
time and distance so easily? Especially when that distance is only being
crossed by light? When there’s a
thunderstorm, we know that the thunderclap lags behind the lightning-flash. We
even know roughly by how much: five seconds’ gap indicates a mile. The speed of
light, though finite, is taken as being infinite on Earth. (How many other
things, which are in fact finite, do we take for infinite?)
There is a poem by Henry Reed, a companion piece to
his famous Naming of Parts, in which the hapless conscript, who has just
finished laboriously taking his rifle apart and putting it together again, is
asked to estimate the distance between himself and a courting couple (which
military terminology does not permit him so to designate) and he comes up with
the answer: about two years.
There is also a painting by René Magritte – probably a series of them, actually, since he was never one to let a good idea go until he’d exploited it thoroughly – in which the sky has the brightness of a normal day, but as you look down, you see a house, outside of which you know it is already night, for a streetlight is burning.
That was the effect I experienced one midsummer
morning when I looked across at my own house. I had no specific reason to do
so. No noise had attracted my gaze in that direction, though perhaps I was
looking that way in a deliberate effort to ignore the hysterical barking of the
senior spaniel, whose obsessive-compulsive pursuit of an invisible and possibly
totally mythical prey in the depths of a nearby thicket was rousing the whole
village – certainly to wakefulness, and probably to anger.
What I saw was a pantechnicon, a huge removal lorry,
parked right outside my house, obscuring almost all of it apart from the
roof. I couldn’t see the rest of the
street properly, but there were certainly empty spaces outside some of the
houses. It didn’t look as though it had parked outside my house just for the
fun of it – besides, I suddenly thought, where was my camper? The fixed
landmark, in which I all too infrequently went away with the dogs for a few
days of dampness, insomnia and liberally splattered mud? (I like to tell the
truth when I can, but some horrors are just too ghastly to record in detail. If
I did, I might never go away again).
There was a kind of ruddy glow in the windows of the
other houses that I associated with a winter sunset. The pantechnicon itself
looked terrifyingly like the one that had brought my possessions one spring a
couple of years before. Its design, in turn, seemed never to have changed since
the late nineteen-thirties, though the courtesy of its operatives was anything
but olde-worlde. If you haven’t moved recently, you will not easily understand
the deep sense of terror the sight inspired in me. Suffice it to say that I
believe any firm of removers, faced with a five-hundred-piece jigsaw, would
pack four hundred and ninety-nine of the pieces at random, each in a different
cardboard box with the rest of the stuff, and drop the five hundredth somewhere
in the driveway. If this seems too extreme a fantasy, let me tell you that they
really and truly grabbed the coat I had just taken off, which contained my only
set of car-keys, in order to wrap up some undistinguished vase. I had to borrow
a neighbour’s car for the next two days until I chanced upon the right
cardboard box.
I was puzzled by the sight, then, but far from
anxious to rush and confront it. My real concern was to recover the dogs, all
of whom were invisible, and mercifully inaudible, by this stage. The sunset
thing was something that only occurred to me afterwards, when I deliberately
recalled the image, after arriving home and finding that the camper was still
there after all, and that there was no sign of any pantechnicon. The dogs, of
course, reappeared as if by magic, the moment I reached the end of the wood.
Sometimes, I almost believe in predestination.
The next time something like this happened was in
the autumn, that season of the year when the twelve-hour gap I try to interpose
between morning and evening walks makes practical sense in terms of the length
of daylight, and seems less like a vain attempt to introduce some kind of order
into canine behaviour. The dogs were with me, eager, but within whistle. It was
about half-past five in the afternoon, the sky pale blue, a pleasant, warm late
September, before the rainy season set in.
I looked across, and saw a long, shiny black car
outside my house. It shouldn’t have been there. I knew what kind of car it was,
a car of ultimate purpose, designed for a single, recumbent passenger. It was
shinier than it should have been, shiny with rain. The roof of my house was
shiny, too, the sky above it streaked with ragged, hanging clouds, in differing
shades of transparent grey, like a freshly painted watercolour.
You don’t need me to tell you that when I came home
everything was as dry as a bone, and no car outside, except the one that I had
parked there while the camper was off for its MOT.
These two experiences came close together. It
doesn’t need that much to make me reflect, on one thing and another, and I
reflected. I didn’t ask myself why me? The things I had seen so far were
not especially personal. I wondered: why here? And I had no answer.
Was there something unusual about the place where I
stood when I saw? Given the lie of the land, and the growth of the trees and
bushes, it had to be always the same place. Was there something strange about
the place I was looking at? Some connection between the two? Had there been –
long since – a mound, obliterated by the winter rains and the farmer’s
ploughing, its traces scattered and denied, to avoid the interference of the
busybodies who would trample the crop and bring the people, the scholars and
the treasure-seekers, the thieves and the gypsies and the scamps and the
ne’erdowells? Had there been a circle of stones, not high but solid, nestling
in sheep-cropped turf, dug up with ease, and mortared into walls, or lining
ditches? Or bones – long bones – too long for most animals – dealt with
“suitably”, calcined to ash in a lime-kiln, lest the constable ask questions
(an ordinary bonfire would never be hot enough).
They did things with bones, in the past. Fetched
them out, and used them, when the flesh was gone. Who knows, what for? Who
knows, whether it worked? When there’s been enough rain, you can find their
ancestors’ flints in the fields. Sharp.
Finely-worked. Everywhere. If I liked living here now, why wouldn’t they have
liked living here then?
Midwinter just gone, as I vainly tried to stop the
dogs from affectionately wiping mud all over me, I caught sight of a flashing
blue light. And I knew it was over there, outside my house. The ambulance was
parked tight in against the kerb, which I knew to be impossible. And the sun
was beating down and glinting off wide-open window-flaps, which I also knew to
be impossible, as the drizzle of a grey pre-dawn was making me regret the
distance I had to travel and the time I had to rise.
No point in looking any further. I had seen what I
had seen. I knew these things would be – or had been. Like Watkins, I had seen
these isolated points, standing out from the landscape – or the timescape, if
you prefer. But unlike him, I didn’t try to make the connections. Because
joining up the dots doesn’t actually produce a picture. That, at least, was
what I told myself. Because I knew better.
Or because I was scared.
9.00am to 2.40 p.m.
August 16th 2002