To the River

by Olivia Laing

  At last the path swung free, down a flight of wooden steps into one of the prettiest fields I’ve ever seen, full of rustling pink grasses hedged by elder foaming with flowers the colour of Jersey cream. I lay on my back under an oak tree and feasted, hated shoes flung off, on oatcakes, cheese and a Granny Smith, pared into slices with the rusty unlockable knife. Flies were landing on my rucksack, resting there a few seconds and then lifting clean away. Each time I closed my eyes the noise of grasshoppers switched on, as if my sight needed to be muffled before I could begin to catch what the day had to say.

  I’d barely seen the Ouse all morning and now I could hear water running low under the nettles, a tributary trickling to the valley beneath. A couple of wood pigeons were entreating one another to take two cows, Susan, take twooo cows, Susan. Behind or above them I could hear a train passing, calling with its horn as it reached the massive viaduct that vaulted the river. The wind was sifting the leaves and the passing sun cast streaming cloud shadows across the countless grasses. There was only one more field ahead, and then the path would meet the water.

  I’d had enough of waiting. I lolloped under the viaduct, hardly pausing to admire its 11 million bricks. For years I’d crossed this bridge twice daily to work, craning each time for a glimpse of the river pothering beneath. Now I was out, scot free, and I didn’t have time to look up to where the trains rattled past, packed with people rebreathing air branded with discontent. At the edge of Rivers Wood, though, I slowed. The landscape had undergone one of its periodic shifts, oak giving way to alder, the high ground to the low. The trees cut out the light, discouraging the grasses. It was a gloomy place, the water stripped of its camouflage and sunk down into the clay. I walked along the bank and came to a halt by a holly bush, setting down beside a clump of wilted ransoms that released as I crushed it the pungent reek of garlic. Upriver I could hear the water running over stones, but here it came slow and grey through the sheer banks, eight feet high and vertebraed with tree roots in fantastic, impossible knots.

  Later that day I would walk into Lindfield and eat chicken tikka in the village pub. I’d see a clump of orchids growing in a verge festooned with litter and I’d sleep at last in a truckle bed in a house that had been built in the last years of Henry VIII’s reign, surrounded by a thousand-year-old box hedge, the oldest in Sussex. The bed was made up with sheets that had been densely hand-embroidered, white on white, and in it I passed a turbulent night, oppressed by the heat and the constant sound of a spring I could not see.

  None of that mattered. As I rose I saw a deer drinking. She didn’t see me as she climbed the bank; then all of a sudden she did. Her hindquarters bunched the way a horse’s will, a motion I knew with my own muscles as the prelude to a buck, and then she sprang away. She moved in an oddly rigid, rocking-horse gait, bounding on stiffened legs across the track and into the darkness of the wood. She was neither rare nor extraordinary, that deer. There were thousands like her, as there were millions like me. But there she was, attending to her own path, which, for a moment, intersected mine. She was as unlikely as the iguanodon, and as imprisoned in time. It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day – the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic – were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.

  III

  GOING UNDER

  I WAS STAYING THAT NIGHT in a house called Copyhold Hollow, which was set beneath a towering wall of beeches. The garden was bursting with flowers – peonies, columbines and overblown roses that strewed their scent through the clear dark air. I didn’t sleep well, and as I lay on my truckle bed drifting in and out of dreams I thought I saw rivers I knew only from books turning like snakes through their shifting terrains. There was Eliot’s strong brown god; Joyce’s Liffey; the plum cake-smelling Thames of The Wind in the Willows; and the terrible river Alph of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

  Territories overlaid each other, or floated weightless, free of any known geography. The rivers riddled through worlds both real and false; they welled up in springs and fountains and gave out on great bleak estuaries and marshes. They ran through Dickens, George Eliot and the Bible, carrying bodies and babies in baskets. There was the Say and the Floss, Conrad’s glittering black Congo, the swift trout courses of Hemingway and Maclean, Huck Finn’s Mississippi, and the Thames of The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf. Though they were nothing more than paper rivers, I felt almost drunk upon them, for they were the true sources of my own obsessive hydrophilia.

  It was almost nine when I properly woke, and I stumbled down to breakfast in a daze, forking up sausages and gulping coffee as the house’s owner talked of Berwick church and the complex intermarriages of the Bloomsbury set. It was 23 June, Midsummer Eve, the date of Shakespeare’s topsy-turvy dream. The following Midsummer Day used to coincide with the solstice until, in 1752, the Julian calendar was exchanged for the Gregorian one and the two festivals drifted free. Midsummer Eve was one of those moments when the gap between worlds was said to grow thin. It was celebrated with bonfires and riotous dances, and was also the moment to pick fern seed, which conveys invisibility upon the bearer, being almost invisible itself.

  I’d planned to leave before it got too hot, but by the time I’d finished the last scraps of bacon the sun was at eye-level and rising fast. There wouldn’t be much river today – briefly where it crossed Sloop Lane and again in the meadows by Sheffield Park. Tomorrow, the path would join it at Vuggles Farm and that would be that, all the way down through Lewes and into the marshland of the Brooks. Today, though, I would be walking mainly in woods, the remains of the great Andredesleage that had once stretched across three counties.

  The first was on the way to Lindfield, where I’d run like a maniac the night before, spooked by the shadows that gathered with the dusk. Now it was quiet and blissfully cool, opening onto a golf course still slippery with dew. The path skimmed the edge of town, crossing the high street and sidling out through the churchyard into a field of mournful cows with pointed hipbones that poked like hangers through their grubby coats. The cows were hot already, clustering in a wavering patch of shade that wouldn’t last an hour.

  There was no such shade on the path. I was in the full sun and the light had begun to play tricks with my eyes. Up by Hangman’s Acre the grasses on either side of the track were etched so clear they glittered. Straw had been scattered on the ground, and it seemed that my vision had become impossibly sharpened; that I could count every stalk in a glance, every head of wheat, each one of the multiple and quaking grasses that bent beneath my feet. The straw was golden without being clean. The light sheered straight off it, a wave of light that didn’t break but bounced straight back to the sky. At the corner of my eye the field flickered as if a hand were tweaking it, as if at any moment the whole trompe-l’œil might be snatched away, the painted corn on its backdrop of blue, though what that might reveal I didn’t like to think.

  I sat against a fencepost and smeared myself with Factor 30. There was a breeze that smelt of dust and roses licking at the hedge, and little queasy flares kept exploding in the wheat. The state was an aura, triggered by the sun, the precursor to a migraine that more often than not fails to arrive. These shifts in vision, which sometimes manifest as falling petals or schools of swimming stars, have the odd side effect of making the world seem unstable, an illusion flung up out of walls of light.

  One of the symptoms of Woolf’s mental illness was migraines, accompanied at the worst of times by hallucinations both auditory and visual. No doubt the experience of finding the evidence of her senses unreliable contributed to her impression of the world as insubstantial and in constant flux, composed of an ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’, an insight that permeates almost all of her books. Some of her characters, now
I came to think of it, also suffered from disturbed or heightened vision, like poor Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway, who walks reeling through Regent’s Park and sees a dog morph into a man, trees quicken into life and the dead approach him from between the park benches.

  I didn’t see dogs change into men, but for the rest of the day my vision seemed untrustworthy, as if I’d been subject unwittingly to the same sort of visual enchantment that afflicts the cast of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some of the mischief there is caused by the juice of love-in-idleness, Viola tricolor, which when painted on sleeping eyelids causes the recipient to fall in love with whatever they next see, be it lion, ape, or a buffoon with an ass’s head. But even those who escape anointing lose faith in the reliability of their sight. ‘Methinks I see these things with parted eye,’ cries a shaken Hermia, ‘When every thing seems double,’ and in reply Demetrius answers: ‘Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.’ Perhaps it was the gift of the date, or the synaptic upheaval brought on by the sun, but all day long I felt periodically uncertain of the solidity of what I saw, as if I too walked through the slipping landscapes of a dream.

  I escaped into Henfield Wood, though to reach it I had to walk through a hamlet of houses unstitched from the village and set back behind their own arcing drives. I kept seeing notices on telegraph posts offering a ‘substantial reward’ for a lost Siamese cat. It wasn’t until I passed the third that I realised the date was 8 September, almost a full year back. They added, those signs, to the sense of stopped or stoppered time that is anyway the knack of midsummer, the fulcrum of the year, when everything seems to brake for a moment before swinging through ripeness and into decay.

  Oh, cheer up, I said to myself, but the lost cat bothered me. A wren in the wood kept calling chink chink chink? chink chink chink?, the final syllable given a querulous upward lift. The light was softer here, draining through ferns and hazel leaves in an overlapping fretwork of greenish scales. There’s something unnerving about a wood. It’s the entrance to a different world, subterranean or set aside. Henfield Wood wasn’t wild. It was intensely managed, the paths clearly marked, the wide ride carrying a swooping run of telegraph poles. I could hear children shrieking, and in the field at its border glossy mares and foals munched companionably on bales of hay delivered by a girl on a quad bike. The fences were in fine repair; the paddocks electrified. This was the south-east, parcelled and divided, immaculately tidy, every square yard accounted for. And yet, no matter how prettified it becomes, a wood retains in its shadows a glint of something less than tame.

  I left the path and pushed my way into a grove of ash and scrubby oak. Something was walking about in the bracken, cracking twigs and stirring leaves. Yesterday, in Rivers Wood, I felt eyes upon me and spun around, expecting to startle a blackbird. A man was standing on the path. When I turned he ducked, and hunched into the ferns. There were two pheasant pens ahead, and the road just past them. Who had scared whom, I wondered now? I’m often frightened in a wood, in a way I’m not anywhere else in the world, except perhaps a multi-storey car park. It’s the fear of what might happen when there’s no one to see, when you’re caught in a maze no less entrapping for being built of trees than concrete.

  I’d been thinking that morning of The Wind in the Willows, and it struck me then that if it had nurtured my love of rivers it might also be responsible for this faint mistrust of woods, for I came to it in such a way that it was impressed indelibly upon my mind. My father left when I was four, and every other weekend he drove up from London to take us to his house. The soundtracks to these journeys were story tapes – The Ghost Stories of M. R. James, Three Men in a Boat, A Tale of Two Cities – and of them all our favourite was The Wind in the Willows. We lived then in theThamesValley, not far from where Kenneth Grahame himself grew up, and the locations, though unnamed, were instantly recognisable. My sister and I listened to that tape so often it became part of our code, turning up in birthday cards and long-standing family jokes. We liked to recite the mantra cold chicken cold tongue cold ham cold beef pickled gherkins salad french rolls cress sandwiches potted meat ginger beer lemonade soda water, and to replicate it as greedily as possible in our own Thames-side picnics.

  One autumn in the early 1980s we were coming home in a storm, and somewhere along the way the car ran out of petrol. It was raining hard and I suppose my father felt he had no choice but to lock the doors and leave us there, with the keys in the ignition and the tape still whirring on. It wasn’t dark but rain was blotting out the windows, and through the streamy glass the world seemed very distant. When we broke down the Toad had just encountered his first motor car, and after his wild raptures the story shifted key. It was a cold still afternoon, the narrator said, and the Mole had gone out walking. The winter air must have intoxicated him, for in one of those moods of recklessness to which he was prone he decided to visit the Wild Wood, though he’d been warned about it long ago.

  My sister and I looked at each other uneasily. At first the wood seemed pleasurably spooky, and it was only when the light began to drain away that the Mole noticed something peering at him from a hole. Could it be a face? He looked hard. No. But then there was another, and another, and suddenly there were hundreds of them, evil wedge-shaped faces with hard staring eyes. Then to the faces was added a flurry of whistles, and then a patter of feet that increased in time to an almighty hail, as if something – someone? – was being relentlessly pursued. The Mole began to run too, pell-mell, his breath ragged, his legs pounding, until at last he almost fell into the hollow of a great beech tree and there took refuge beneath a pile of dead leaves.

  My father returned at that moment, fortuitously enough, driven by a stranger and clutching a billycan of petrol. The Mole – we waited breathlessly – was also safe. Rat had come to find him, armed with a cudgel, and the pair of them had stumbled across Badger’s den as the woods subsided into snow. No harm was done. No one had been bludgeoned to death by a weasel; we were still intact in the back seat. And yet this incident confirmed in me a creeping sense that the world was not always as pleasant as it seemed, so that when I heard the story of Kenneth Grahame himself, I cannot say I was wholly surprised at how dark it turned out to be.

  Kenneth was born in Edinburgh in 1859 and spent his early years in Argyll, where his father was the Sheriff-Substitute. He lost a lot of things early on – a mother, a father, his home – and though his mother’s death was caused by scarlet fever the rest were the result of drink. Cunningham Grahame was an alcoholic: a secret and morbid drunk of the kind that can wreck a family, not through violence or malice but by failing to prevent it from slipping into chaos. After his wife’s death Cunningham’s drinking was no longer under his control, and it became apparent to the more sober members of the family that the four bereaved children would need to be transplanted into a different home.

  The one chosen for them was The Mount in Cookham Dean, a little Berkshire village a mile from the Thames. The Mount belonged to Kenneth’s maternal grandmother and was, according to his own account, a boundless paradise of orchards, fir woods, ponds and streams, populated by bandits, robbers and pirates with pistols! This period – low in adult intervention, rich in imaginative play – sustained Kenneth deeply and though it wouldn’t last two years it lived on as a lost Arcadia that fed all his later work. He drew on Cookham Dean repeatedly in the dreamy, nostalgic stories that made him famous, and he returned to the river in his final book: the tale of Ratty, Mole and Mr Toad.

  The Mount and its magical gardens were sold in 1866 and at around the same time Cunningham offered to take all four of his children back. A year later, he threw in the towel and bolted, abandoning his house, resigning his job and travelling to France, where he would spend the rest of his life in a cheap boarding house in Le Havre. The children returned to their grandmother, who’d by now moved to a cottage not far from Cookham Dean, and in 1868 Kenneth was sent away to school, the fees paid by an uncle. The traumatic effects of t
his triad of events, so closely bound in time, can be gauged in his inability to remember anything particularly after the age of seven. With the loss of The Mount and his father his childhood was in all real senses at an end.

  Boarding school teaches boys to conceal their feelings and hide their private selves so deeply that it’s sometimes impossible to access them again. Kenneth managed the trick of self-disappearance well enough. He had, after all, long been accustomed to hiding his secret world from adults, those Olympians whose stereotyped and senseless habits he liked to mock in later stories. The problem was that this hidden self failed to mature; that Kenneth, put simply, never quite grew up. The concealed boy remained undeveloped within him, and though this meant he possessed an unusually acute sense of how a child thinks and feels, it also left him peculiarly unsuited to the life he was required to lead.

  What Kenneth wanted was to attend Oxford University, a place that he conflated almost with fairyland and from which he felt painfully debarred. In an essay published posthumously he wrote touchingly of this sense of exclusion:

  But those great and lofty double gates, sternly barred and never open invitingly, what could they portend? I wondered. It was only slowly and much later that I began to understand that they were strictly emblematical and intended to convey a lesson. Among the blend of qualities that go to make up the charm of collegiate life, there was then more of a touch of (shall I say?) exclusiveness and arrogance. No one thought the worse of it on that account: still its presence was felt, and the gates stood to typify it. Of course, one would not dream of suggesting that the arrogance may still be there. But the gates remain.

  There is an unmistakable echo of these lines in the work of Virginia Woolf. She never went to school, let alone university, and in A Room of One’s Own she writes with a mixture of longing and irony of a visit she made to Cambridge, where she was repeatedly shut out or sent away on account of her sex, for ladies may not walk on college turf and ‘are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction’. Her lack of formal education left her with a lifelong sense – sometimes oppressive, sometimes liberating – of being an outsider, and this in turn provoked a diary entry that I suspect Kenneth would have appreciated: ‘Insiders write a colourless English. They are turned out by the University machine. I respect them . . . They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.’