Footnotes

by Peter Fiennes

  I don’t know. Perhaps all I can say for certain is that I’m staring into the once holy waters of St Cleer and there are two discarded plastic bottles pressed up against an iron grille. So I pick them up. There’s got to be a recycling bin around here somewhere.

  Wilkie’s father, William, was a moderately successful artist, painting in the traditional manner of the time. In 1822 he was commissioned to accompany King George IV on a trip to Scotland (where he arranged to meet and then married Wilkie’s exuberant mother, Harriet). As the years passed, William became a staid sort of man, obsessed with the finer points of religion, carving out a comfortable living, treading a conventional path: the kind of artist people turned to when they wanted a commemorative portrait or landscape, nothing to frighten the horses. Charles Dickens, flush with success from the publication of Nicholas Nickleby, became one of his clients in 1839, asking William to paint him ‘a seashore with figures’ for £100. Dickens met the father long before he knew the son.

  As Wilkie drifted around St Cleer’s Well, he found himself lost in a reverie about his father. William had died three years earlier and Wilkie missed him, although he perhaps didn’t miss having to account for his time or choice of career. The money he’d been left was also useful (Harriet was holding William’s characteristically modest but solid estate, to share between Wilkie and his older brother, Charles). In 1836, when Wilkie was just twelve, William had taken his family to Italy and France for almost two years, interrupting Wilkie’s sporadic schooling and igniting a lifelong passion for travel, mystery, antique ruins and painting – and where, walking with his father, he ‘first learned to appreciate the beauties of Nature under guidance which, in this world, I can never resume’. When he returned to Rome seventeen years later, his travelling companions had to put up with a number of excitable tales that suggested it wasn’t only ancient ruins that Wilkie was exploring in his early teens. ‘Wilkie’, wrote Dickens in a letter to his sister-in-law, Georgina Hogarth, ‘in a carriage one day, [gave us] a full account of his first love adventure. It was at Rome it seemed, and proceeded, if I may be allowed the expression, to the utmost extremities – he came out quite a pagan Jupiter in the business.’

  The first thing to know about Wilkie, I am learning, is that he is a storyteller. In later years he would be acclaimed as a man who could weave a thrilling tale and puncture some of the most absurd hypocrisies of the age, especially when it came to the inequitable treatment of women; but it is also true that, even as he produced his sensational, campaigning novels from his solitary home in Marylebone, he was secretly installing one, and then two, mistresses (and their families) in separate houses around the corner. It’s like my mother said, a man with a beard always has something to hide. Just ask Enid. In 1838, when the Collins family returned at last from their foreign trip, and the fourteen-year-old Wilkie found himself enrolled in a grim little boarding school in Highbury, the only way he could keep the dormitory bully from beating him every night was by telling him ever more fantastical stories. Entertain me! Or feel the pain. Wilkie was a proper little Scheherazade all his life, but I imagine the habit started here.

  You’ll understand, then, if we don’t take everything in Rambles Beyond Railways at face value. With the day getting older, Wilkie and Henry headed north, deeper into the Cornish moor. They passed Trethevy Quoit, a Neolithic dolmen that looks rather like one of the advent houses that my family attempts to make every year out of slabs of gingerbread and icing, the main difference being that ‘The Place of Graves’, as Wilkie called it, has been standing on this spot for many thousands of years and still hasn’t disintegrated into a slew of sticky pastry. It’s peaceful here in the late April sunshine. Fields and hedgerows have grown up around the stones – and Trethevy Quoit is so much part of the landscape that, despite its size, a dog walker strolls past and doesn’t even spare a glance. New housing has been built a few yards away, just beyond a wire fence and a ditch. I look over and there’s a woman in white sitting on the nearest balcony, sipping a mug of tea and reading a novel (there is! I mean, it’s cream-coloured leisurewear or something, but still: she’s a woman; in white). And she’s close enough to start a whispered conversation. ‘Is that the road to London?’ I want to ask ‘with nervous, uncertain lips’, but I’m worried she might start giving me directions (why indeed wouldn’t she?), when I don’t actually want to go to London.

  When Wilkie was here the Quoit stood alone in ‘a barren country’, but then (and now) its ‘aboriginal simplicity … renders it an impressive, almost a startling object to look on’. Startling, yes. In many other countries there’d be a car park and a hullaballoo of kiosks and cafés; here you can jump up and take a restorative nap on the Quoit’s sloping roof, a great twenty-tonne hunk of immovable granite. And yet, well over 4,000 years ago, someone somehow lifted these immense stones and placed them here. No one knows why.

  Wilkie loved mysteries. His stories are constructed out of intricate layers of conspiracy, confusion and dread. For most of the time, the truth is elusive, or teased at, or obfuscated by a multitude of voices. There is a sensational secret at the heart of his most famous novel, The Woman in White, but to get to it his characters have to unpick a tangle of subterfuge and lies, before they can approach the chilling truth. Along the way, Wilkie exposes and rails against some contemporary injustices, although he’s no Dickens. In fact, can you imagine Dickens walking past the now defunct Caradon Mine, as Wilkie did soon after leaving Trethevy Quoit, and having nothing more to say than: ‘far beneath the embankment on which we stood, men, women and children were breaking and washing ore in a perfect marsh of copper-coloured mud and copper-coloured water.’ Children? Who cares that the water is ‘copper-coloured’? There are children working in the mine. Dickens would have had a letter to The Times out by nightfall and a novel in the shops the following year.

  No, what Wilkie cares about is the story. No one else but Dickens could write such nail-biting serial cliffhangers (Dickens knew this and used Wilkie as much as he could in his magazines, even hiring him as a staff writer on Household Words for a while). Wilkie was aware of criticisms in his lifetime that he sacrificed character for plot, that he was more concerned with a rattling good yarn than he was in exploring the complexities of human affairs, and he even self-consciously tried to do something about it with his later novels. But I don’t think the criticisms are remotely fair. Just look at the way he uses different narrators in The Woman in White to build an intricate picture of the characters’ thoughts and lives. He had passion and empathy. What other (bearded) Victorian writer could have created the heroic Marian, who drives the investigation into her cousin’s sinister husband, even if Wilkie almost ruins his proto-feminism by giving her ‘a masculine mouth and jaw’ and dark down on her upper lip that is ‘almost a moustache’? He does the same in his detective story, The Moonstone, mixing perspectives, giving women a voice, but this time thickening the fog of mystery with a blow-back of opiates.

  By the time he was writing The Moonstone in 1867, Wilkie was irrevocably addicted to laudanum. (If you’re wondering about the recipe, it’s a tincture, and easy to prepare: simply dilute one part opium or morphine with ten parts brandy; flavour with a dash of cayenne pepper, ether, hashish or anything else that comes to hand; shake; dose yourself generously as pain or inclination dictate.) Key passages of this dreamily intricate work were dictated to Harriet, the daughter of his first mistress, Caroline Graves, when he was in great pain and desperately swigging on the drug. It was said that when Wilkie was on a trip to Switzerland, he had to send a friend to go and buy his supplies from numerous separate chemists, because individually they couldn’t provide him with the quantities he needed. By 1885 he had been taking so much for so long that his surgeon said he was consuming enough ‘to kill a dozen people’.

  Wilkie, like any good addict, always said that he wasn’t affected, but from very early middle age he suffered from gout (cripplingly), headaches, rheumatic pains, agues and weeping eyes and co
uldn’t survive without regular infusions. He was living in a time when laudanum was freely available over the counter; and had grown up in a household where his mother, Harriet, could say to her anguished friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge (who, to be fair, had a much more tortured relationship with the drug than Wilkie ever did): ‘Mr Coleridge, do not cry; if the opium really does you any good, and you must have it, why do you not go and get it?’

  Amen to that.

  I wonder if there was any blister-soothing laudanum in Wilkie’s knapsack on this walking tour of Cornwall? He was certainly familiar with the drug two years later, when he wrote to his mother from a seaside holiday with Dickens and his family that ‘the sea air acts on me as if it was all distilled from laudanum’. Perhaps the sea air was enough this time. He was a young man and a vigorous one: and he covered the miles. I’m struggling in his wake as we make our way over the moor, with the rock formation known as the Cheesewring as our goal, although for now I take a breather (as did Wilkie) among the three ancient standing stone circles known as ‘the Hurlers’. The stones in one of the circles are remarkably well preserved, although it seems a curtailed attempt was made to re-erect some of them in the 1930s, so it’s hard to know how many of them were standing when Wilkie passed by.

  Wilkie reckoned there were only two possible theories for their existence: they are either the remains of ‘a Druid Temple’; or they are the petrified bodies of local men who went out to play ball on the Sabbath Day (the ‘hurlers’) and were turned into pillars of stone for their wickedness. He preferred the latter explanation; and it’s possible, of course; although I also have to break it to him that the stones are almost certainly not the remains of a ‘Druid Temple’ either – or rather, they are not the creation of what we now think of as Druids. I have a killjoy booklet by Paul White to hand, Druids in the South-West?, and he is adamant that the Druids had nothing to do with the ‘building of the West Country’s megaliths’. ‘Druids’, with their golden scythes and mistletoe and white robes, that is; and their belief that all living beings’ souls are connected and intermingle at our births and deaths. They probably came much later than these stones – and were obliterated by the Roman armies at Anglesey. Although, really, what do we know? Only that we are treading a land where the Druids and their ideas are making yet another tentative comeback.

  A stout middle-aged man in faded, high-crotched orange dungarees, with dark curly hair cascading out from underneath a Breton sailor’s cap, is striding purposefully around these stone circles, directing an elderly couple where to sit (his parents I guess), and all the while talking loudly about himself and his needs and desires and hopes and gripes. It has to be his parents. No one else would put up with it. His decrepit father totters off to go and sit by himself next to a stone at the opposite edge of the circle and I watch with an uprush of sympathy as he painfully and oh-so-slowly lowers himself to the ground. The babbling man’s mother remains with her son and she listens mutely to his endless, energetic complaints, many of them directed at his father: ‘What’s he doing?’ ‘Why’s he sitting there?’ ‘Why doesn’t he come back?’ ‘He’s too old.’ Wilkie also talked a great deal, in an easy, sweet-tempered flow, although he was interested in what other people had to say, and he found an outlet for his teeming brain in the books he created. Perhaps Babbling Man is one of our greatest living authors, or artists. Not that it matters, of course; we must all find our way out. But not to be able to fall silent in this wondrous place, when the wind drops and the late April sun caresses us with soft paws and strokes the lichen-coated granite and an intoxicating aroma of bog and spent sunshine is rising from the tussocky earth; and in fact when the souls of the Celts themselves might be here, in these stones and grasses, waiting to infuse us with some ancient, transformative magic … I mean, please; this is babbling agony.

  To the Cheesewring, then – they’ll never follow us there. Wilkie described this tower of rocks, set on a pinnacle on the edge of the moor, as ‘the wildest and most wondrous of all the wild and wondrous structures in the rock architecture of the scene’. He went on: ‘If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones in a nightmare, he would dream of such a pile as the Cheesewring. All the heaviest and largest of the seven thick slabs of which it is composed are at the top; all the lightest and smallest at the bottom.’

  As Wilkie and Henry approached the Cheesewring, they were waylaid by a roar of welcome from a gang of awesomely drunk Cornish sightseers. All men, it goes without saying. Henry (the nervous artist) bolted for cover, saying he had to go and sketch, so Wilkie was left alone to share the lads’ beer, and one of them ‘violently uncorked a bottle and directed half of its contents in a magnificent jet of light brown froth all over everybody’. A true Cornish welcome, they bellowed, although the beery bonhomie soon turned sour because Wilkie was so eager to get past them and up to the top. I only mention it because I’m not sure this sort of thing happens very often any more – at least not to me.

  I scramble up the final hill as the sun sinks closer to the horizon and settle myself on some rocks, at the very top of the plateau, just back from the Cheesewring (or Wringcheese as it was called by the eighteenth-century antiquarian the Revd William Borlase). I think I’m alone and get quite a shock when a crow gives a half-strangled yelp and then grunts like a disaffected hog. What strange ghosts must lurk here? Almost immediately a Scottish couple emerges from behind a pile of granite. ‘Excuse me, but is this the Cheesewring?’ they ask, pointing to the rocks I’m sitting on. ‘Well, no,’ I say, gesturing down the hill at the seven large granite slabs, each one larger than the next, all precariously balanced on top of one another. ‘I think that is.’ We agree it is an extraordinary sight. And they wonder if I know how it got there, so I say: ‘I’m afraid everything I know is at least 150 years out of date, but according to Wilkie Collins (you know?), the Cheesewring was probably not built by Druids, as people once thought, but is a natural geological formation, although it’s possible the Druids may have cleared away a few stones and some detritus to give it its shape. Also, the Druids almost certainly used the top of the Cheesewring to make speeches to their tribes – and made secret sacrifices up there.’ They take this strange and archaic explanation in their stride. They nod wisely. And then they disappear rapidly down the hill, leaving me to wonder if Wilkie would be pleased to think his erratically researched holiday book was still being quoted all these years later, and its dubious opinions absorbed and spread and repeated as gospel. Or perhaps the Scottish couple just thought I was unhinged.

  I’ve been enjoying pottering around the eastern fringes of Cornwall, but it still comes as a relief when Wilkie all of a sudden plunges deeper into the county, rattling through the sixty-odd miles from Liskeard to Helston at the head of the Lizard Peninsula, without saying a word about any of it. Despite his earlier maunderings about the joys of hiking, I have a strong suspicion he and Henry may have taken a coach. Wilkie quotes Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy approvingly: ‘I think it very much amiss that a man cannot go quietly through a town and let it alone, when it does not meddle with him.’

  Bad weather kept them trapped in Helston – ‘the dullest of towns’ – thinking dark thoughts about its inhabitants – ‘a riotous and drunken set’ – and its ‘superlatively ugly’ church. With the rain slenching down on Wilkie, it’s worth mentioning the popular theory, resisted by many, that weather shapes character. Nirad Chaudhuri believed it. Here he is in his book A Passage to England: ‘the weather has very largely entered into the formation of the Englishman’s mind, and the training of his sensibilities. It has made him responsive to changes in the environment, capable of meeting surprises of all kinds, both pleasant and unpleasant’. Or, to put it another way: ‘After experiencing the English weather I had no difficulty in understanding why Englishmen became so offensive in India, losing their usual kindliness … Their sense of proportion broke down.’

  The only thing going for Helston, said Wilkie, was its festival, ‘the Furry’, held ever
y year on 8 May, when the whole town dances all day and capers through the streets, hand in hand, garlanded with flowers and leaves. Or so he’d heard, although he never saw the thing (and was relying on Richard Polwhele’s 1803–8 History of Cornwall for a full account of ‘these extraordinary absurdities’). Wilkie could be supercilious about folk traditions, but the Furry was still going 100 years later when the surrealist artist, and local writer, Ithell Colquhoun visited in 1954 and 1955, and she relates how the town gathered to dance (especially the school children, but in the end everyone, including the local ‘worthies’), and she describes the dance winding up and down the streets and in and out of the flower-clad houses, while ‘the figure is executed as a foursome by the first two couples and so on down the chain’. Ithell was alert to mystic undercurrents, and she says that some locals thought the dance had originated in honour of the sun god, and was brought to Cornwall many thousands of years earlier by settlers from Egypt. True or not, in the 1950s the streets were also alive with jugglers, boxers, palmists, magicians and acrobats and Ithell found herself buying a remedy made from ‘holy thistle’ from ‘a Gypsy Lee’. When she opened the package later it contained some sage-green tablets, a pixie charm and an address in Lincolnshire ‘where one could write for advice’. The pills, she said, ‘smelled like the unguent of the witch-coven’. The sad fact is, Wilkie didn’t get to experience any of this – and nor did I. The key, it seems, is to visit Helston on 8 May; or otherwise avoid the town.

  Wilkie was equally scathing about the next place he visited, mainly because it called itself ‘Lizard Town’ and he thought this absurd when it was no more than a few muddy little streets and rickety cottages, seething with ‘ducks, geese, cocks, hens, pigs, cows, horses, dunghills, puddles, sheds, peat-stacks, timber, nets’. Maybe someone was listening, because it’s just plain ‘Lizard’ on the Ordnance Survey map now, even though the number of houses has multiplied and the livestock and everything else has been tidied away, replaced by tubs and window boxes heavy with flowers and (on this hot, still, dusty day) a lingering aroma of chip fat. I wonder, as I wander up and down the few spruce streets, if David Icke has ever visited Lizard Town. You would think he should, because he believes (in case you haven’t been keeping up) that humanity is being ruled by a master race of lizards, who have disguised themselves as our leaders – and surely Lizard Town would be a good place to explore his theory. Although it does then occur to me that this may be exactly what they’re expecting.