To the River

by Olivia Laing

  A marriage is a private business, even for people who leave behind them such a vast litter of diaries, letters and third-party gossip. What occurs at its centre, what bonds maintain it, are not always visible, or even guessable, to the outsider’s greedy eye. But the sense that arises from this residue of words is of an abiding love, comprised in equal parts of affection and intellectual stimulation.My inviolable centre, Virginia called Leonard, and the last words she wrote were to him alone: a testament, against all the odds, to the happiness they’d shared. The title of one of the many books about the Woolfs’ liaison is The Marriage of True Minds, a line drawn from Sonnet 116, itself an ode to enduring love. The sentiment is accurate enough, but it is a couplet later in the poem –

  Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

  But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

  – that I think may be even more appropriate, all things considered.

  The bees were still passing through the meadow, drifting along their wobbling paths a few feet above my head. I rolled onto my back and spread out beneath the sun. It was so warm it felt as if my flesh were melting, and when I closed my eyes the light made a kaleidoscope on the inside of their lids. ‘The bees of infinity’, the filmmaker Derek Jarman once called them, ‘the golden swarm . . . their pollen sacs all different yellows’. Beekeeping was one of the activities he turned to when he was dying of AIDS, when he moved to Prospect Cottage, the little wooden house on Dungeness beach, the fifth quarter at the end of the globe. He kept them in a hive made of railway sleepers, in the garden he wrestled from the shingle, and they made honey from the woodsage in August and in January from the gorse.

  In his last years, I remembered then, Jarman too went blind, when toxoplasmosis ravaged his retinas. ‘Someone . . . said losing your sight must be frightening,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Not so, as long as you have a safe harbour in the sea of shadows. Just inconvenient. If you woke on a dark day, had only the mind’s eye with which to see your way, would you turn back?’ And later: ‘The day of our death is sealed up. I do not wish to die . . . yet. I would love to see my garden through several summers.’ His last film, Blue, replicated his own sightless vision: an unchanging blue screen for seventy-nine minutes. It’s the colour of the void, the saturated ultramarine of the world behind the sky. The soundtrack, a drift of memories interwoven with poetry, misquotes William Blake: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would be seen as it is.’

  I stood abruptly and as I did the blood rushed to my head and I rose amid the whirling grasses temporarily both dizzy and blind, the roar of the bees bouncing off me in a language I couldn’t begin to decode, let alone to prophesy.

  Back at the Chequers, I slept until the sun dropped to its final quarter, and then went to the bar, where I ate an almighty burger that fell apart when I poked it, watched over by a moustachioed dog whose owner did not move an inch the entire time I was there. But it was impossible not to go out again, into the lovely, diminishing day. The swallows were rising and falling about the church tower when I left, calling in high voices above the grave of Nelson’s sister.

  The path I took led to Slaugham Furnace Pond, a relic of the iron industry that once dominated this region. The idea that nature can be prised free from civilisation is, in England’s overpopulated south at least, absurd. The landscape hereabouts has been shaped by centuries of man’s activities, as man, I suppose, has been shaped by the land. To make nails or cannons, or the dainty tweezers that even the Romans used, you needed iron, and the combination of dense woodland to fuel the charcoal fires and clay rich in ironstone ore set the Weald at the heart of the industry from before the Romans until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

  The earliest furnace ponds were formed by damming streams with clay bays, to provide the steady outflow of water that would power the bellows of the bloomery, the furnace used to smelt iron ore. Later, after the introduction of the blast furnace, the ponds were used to drive the bellows and helve hammers in finery forges, where the raw pig iron was remelted to form the bloom that would be drawn by the hammerman into the purer bar iron. I tried to reconstruct it in my mind as I walked: the forge fires that could be seen ten miles from here, the smashing hammer blows that echoed all the way to the Downs. Now the lakes are the province of anglers, who use a language every bit as specific as that of the hammermen. No bivvies or boilies, no keep nets. Dickie comes up trumps in furnace carp bonanza.

  The first pipistrelles were crossing Coos Lane as I reached the water. There were three cars left in the car park, along with the remnants of someone’s McDonald’s. It was just after sunset and everything had stilled, the sky shot faintly with rose. The reflections in the lake seemed sunk very deep. The water pleated as the carp sank and climbed, occasionally breaking the surface to shivers. Beneath them, the slow clouds made their way east. At the far side of the lake the trees were reflected in sooty green and when the fish jumped there the ripples ran in white concentric circles. On the near side, where there was only pale sky on the skin of the water, the ripples flashed dark, a trick of the light I’d never seen before. The flies were circling, and three men were fishing on the far bank, another two just north of me. Splash, and again: splash.

  I hunkered down on the jetty. A plane was crossing the pinkish sky, and in the underwater world it crossed too, drawing an elongating contrail behind it. In the sky, the plane flew steadily, still gaining altitude from Gatwick. Beneath the water, though, it moved differently, the contrail whipping back and forth with the ripples so that it seemed to be swimming in sideways strokes, as a snake does. If only my vision were clear enough, I might have made out the faces at the windows far below, beneath the water’s surface. I needed a goddess to clean my eyes. If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would be seen as it is.

  There are sights too beautiful to swallow. They stay on the rim of the eye; it cannot contain them. I remembered something Virginia Woolf had written, about an evening ‘too beautiful for one pair of eyes. Instinctively I want someone to catch my overflow of pleasure.’ There was no one to turn to. Even the fishermen had fallen silent; the murmured chat about casts and catches abandoned for the day. We talk of drinking in a sight, but what of the excess that cannot be caught? So much goes by unseen. ‘After an hour outside walking,’ the naturalist Hannah Hinchman wrote, ‘colours begin to appear much more brilliant, more saturated. Oxygen to the brain? Rods and cones sufficiently steeped?’ But no matter how long I stayed outdoors, there was a world that would remain invisible to me, just at the cusp of perception, glimpsable only in fragments, as when the delphinium at dusk breathes back its unearthly, ultraviolet blue.

  Deep blue, the last colour to remain before the dark. All of a sudden the sky was flooded with it. It hung for only a moment, immense and luminous, and then the night came down all at once, and closed even the west from view. I jogged home, suddenly cold, and let myself in through the fire escape, squeezing past the ironing board and the trouser press. The window was open, and just before I fell asleep voices washed up from the porch. All right Pat, see you later, see you later Trev, nice to see you. You’re not allowed on the motorway, not with them L-plates. Will you shut up a minute, I’m talking to you. Don’t mind me, don’t mind me, I’m a bit worried about Trevor. Trev! Trev! Me, me, me, ain’t it Trevor? Aw, Irene hit me. No surprise there. Aw yeah, go on then. Trev, Trev, me, me, me, ain’t it? We’ll see you Christmas Eve. Ta-ra then Trev, lovely to see you. I listened to them leave, in a flurry of coughs and car engines, and then, for the night’s short reach, I slept.

  Next morning I set out again, after a plate of metallic tomatoes and toast spread thickly with margarine. There’d be no dithering today. I had eight miles to cover, curving south-east through the High Weald to the outskirts of Lindfield, where I’d found a room for the night. The High Weald is a strange, medieval stretch of countryside that runs from Hampshire right through to Kent. The name weald comes from the Old Englis
h word for woodland, and these sloping acres of entwined forest and field were once the largest wildwood in England. The Anglo-Saxons called it Andredesleage: a vast, knotted wilderness of oak, ash and hornbeam, alder, hazel and holly, full of wolves and wild boar. Vaguely alchemical industries grew up in the Weald: charcoal burning, iron smelting, the production of forest glass. It is astonishing what wood and earth together will yield, given a spark and a puff of air. A window-pane, say, bubbling and settling into cool green sheets, like ice on a winter’s day.

  The same combination of trees and clay rich in ore that made the Weald so suitable for iron also made it hard to penetrate, and in the wilder regions passage was limited to the old drovers’ tracks that have lived on as deep-sunken lanes. Though deforestation was so severe in Tudor times that an act was passed banning the felling of young trees, the Weald still has the highest proportion of ancient woodland in the country. Scraps of Wealden language have also survived, and even today the river’s tributaries cut through steep-sided valleys called ghylls, and the trees edge fields in shaggy strips known as shaws.

  I followed a beech-lined lane into Staplefield, and then swung south, past two men from the Electricity Board sawing the lops and tops off an ash tree. In the next field a man with a dog came up as I stooped to look at a spray of yellow bells by the hedge. Do you want to know what that is? he asked. What do you want, the common name or the Latin? He stood back on his heels. Nope, it’s gone. I’ll remember in a minute. It transpired he was a gardener, though he added shamefacedly It’s forty years since I learnt all that. He began to tell me about the cannabis that people from Brighton cultivated in the hedges hereabouts. I picked some the other day and gave it to my wife. She’s green as grass. Stoned? She couldn’t walk! Thought I was trying to poison her. He saluted me and wandered off, still trying to puzzle back the forgotten flower.

  The path spilled on down a long lion-coloured meadow into a valley lined with ashes. There the river ran in riffles over the gravel beds that the sea trout need to breed. I crossed it at Hammerhill Bridge, running milky in the sun, and climbed east again into Hammerhill Copse. The land had lain open to the morning, and now it seemed to close up like a clam. There was a woman’s coat hanging over the gate to the wood, the chain padlocked about it like a belt. Who drops a coat in a wood? The label had been cut out, and the pink satin lining was stippled by mould.

  Hammerhill is another relic of the iron industry, and the nearby Holes Wood was where ore was once mined. The remains of the foundries are all over this region: the bell pits marked by circular depressions that fill with water come winter, the streams hiding discarded slag within their shingle beds. The local names for the layers found within a pit are lovely, shifting region by region with the lay of the land. Near Heathfield, the miner might work down through seams of thirteen foot balls, greys, hogsheads, seven foot, pitty clouts, three foot pitty, bull and bottom. Further east, in Ashburnham, there were foxes, chevaliers and hazards, each with its own character and aptitude for burning. It seemed strange to me that a cannon could be made from a lump of forge-fired rock, but perhaps it’s no less strange than the history of these compacted layers of clay and shelly lime.

  In the Cretaceous period, 140 million years ago, the Weald was a fragrant swamp shaded by cycads and fringed with horsetail and the ferns that still appear, black-tinged, in fossils. The Wealden Beds of sandstone and clay were deposited then as sediments of silt and sand dragged down by giant rivers that flowed from the north and west. Over time the earth’s crust subsided and the sea flooded in, burying the beds under marine sand and clay that would form the layers of Lower Greensand, Gault and Upper Greensand. For the next 35 million years chalk was formed from the bodies of minute sea creatures – single-celled algae and phytoplankton – that fell at the end of their lives like rain through the warm sea, accumulating a centimetre each thousand years. At the end of the Cretaceous period, the land began to rise, and the Weald lifted again out of the water, a vast chalk dome, of which the North and South Downs are the fragmentary remains. Over time the centre was worn away, inch by inch, by rain and frost and the weathering work of water, until it was at last carved into deep clay valleys and sandstone ridges like the one on which I stood.

  On the edge of Hammerhill Copse, rooks were flying in pairs above the ash trees and two swifts hunted flies in the shimmering air. It was hard to believe that the landscape had ever been other than it was now, and so it’s not surprising that those infinitely slow transformations were not even guessed at by man, that late arrival, until the creaking register of geological time had almost reached the present day. Geology as a discipline was established in the late eighteenth century, and the first geologists, often clergymen, hoped that their discoveries would verify the biblical record of Genesis, which states that the world was formed out of darkness by the hand of God: a small Eden seeded by beasts; a fruited world given to God’s double, man, his ersatz self, to have at his command.

  Fossils are often at odds with the regions in which they’re found, the stony remains of shellfish, cuttlefish and oysters abandoned many miles from the shore, and so it was generally held in the West that they were reliquiae diluvianae, relics left behind when the great waters that God unleashed across the world subsided, and Noah and his ark ran aground on the mountain of Ararat. This belief, gradually and categorically disproven, remains stubbornly persistent, clinging on today in the pseudo-scientific ‘flood geology’ of the creationists, who invoke mighty geysers and rents in the earth’s tectonic plates in their bid to explain where sufficient water came from and drained to that did prevail so exceedingly upon the earth that it was sunk to the depth of fifteen cubits.

  In the town where Matthew grew up they told a different story of Noah’s flood, replacing the creationist piety with low English comedy. The medieval Wakefield Mystery Play has at its centre a pitched battle between Noah and his stubborn wife that culminates with an exchange of blows and insults – ramshit! Nichol needy! – that would make Punch and Judy blush. And when the rain stops and the ship with its cargo of paired beasts reaches land, Noah is not thrilled but horrified by the spectacle that awaits him, of a featureless earth that might never have been inhabited. ‘Behold, on this green,’ he cries:

  . . . neither cart nor plough

  Is left on the scene, neither tree nor bough,

  Nor other thing,

  But all is away:

  Many castles, I say

  Great towns of array

  Flit in this flooding.

  Typical Yorkshireman, I thought to myself: never bloody happy. But you don’t have to believe in the testimony of Genesis to understand Noah’s shock. Isn’t that how the world goes, disappearing before our very eyes? The play was last performed in 1576. How many trees had survived since then, how many carts and castles and ploughs? Probably not a single oak in the whole vast Weald, though their lives make man seem puny. They had been swept up by that silent, shiftless flood which swirls perpetually across this world. In time it would obliterate everything in sight, for forms rise but briefly and collapse no matter how solid they look.

  In this landscape of erasure, one plant stood out as an anomaly, a living fossil. The horsetail that choked every half-damp ditch I passed had been here when the Weald was still a tropical swamp, long before the chalky Downs were formed. If a nuclear winter ever comes to pass it’s the horsetail I’ll put my money on, rising stiff-fronded through the dust and rubble as it has for the last 230 million years. Equisetum, as it is properly known, is the living link between our own age and that of the dinosaurs. Cows trample it now, but it was growing here when the Weald was home to the iguanodon, one of the first dinosaurs to be discovered.

  The earliest traces of the iguanodon were found at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the obstetrician and geologist Gideon Mantell, just over a mile from where I now stood. In this period neither the concept nor the word dinosaur existed and even the idea that life forms might become extinct was new and b
arely tolerated. Geology, as I have said, was an emerging discipline, and in the rush to find and date the layers of rock that comprised the planet’s crust, a number of mysterious fossils were being unearthed and, for the first time, systematically classified. The categorisation of early mammals was fairly easy, but stranger and more ambiguous remains were also being discovered. In 1811, on the coast of Lyme Regis, the fossil-hunter Mary Anning had found the skeleton of a previously unknown marine reptile. It was named, after some considerable debate, the ichthyosaur, and over the next ten years various papers were published describing its anatomy and provenance. The discovery caused ripples of intense excitement in the scientific establishment on both sides of the Channel. What was this strange creature, which didn’t look like anything so far found in the sea? How old was it? And if it really was extinct, why had God created it only to let it drop out of existence?

  Like Anning, Mantell was fascinated by fossils and the secret history they seemed to encode. Originally a shoemaker’s son from Lewes, he worked by necessity as a country doctor, pursuing his interest in geology between delivering the town’s babies. His father had not been able to afford to send him to university, and the poverty of his background bothered him intensely. The Mantells had once been noble, and like many poor and clever children, Gideon dreamed of restoring his family name. He’d been collecting fossils since childhood; the first, an ammonite, he found just beneath the surface of one of the streams that fed the Ouse.