To the River

by Olivia Laing

  She has a calm interest in copulation . . . and this led us to the revelation of all Georges malefactions. To my surprise, she has always had an intense dislike of him; and used to say ‘Whew – you nasty creature’, when he came in and began fondling me over my Greek. By the time I got to the bedroom scenes, she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick.

  Greek also took a role in Virginia’s madness, which resembled manic depression and was never satisfactorily diagnosed. During the course of her life she had five major breakdowns: two in the wake of her parents’ deaths; two around the time she married Leonard and published her first novel; and one at the beginning of the Second World War that ended with her death. In the interim she was often physically ill and beset by moods of anxiety and acute depression. These spells of insanity have been repeatedly written about, sometimes by people – among them Leonard, Vanessa and Virginia herself – who experienced them first hand, and sometimes by those who didn’t. Such obsessive rehandling inevitably hardens and reduces a life, turning its complex, contradictory material into a story, with a story’s reliance on intelligible consequences and colourful scenes.

  In this manner, it’s possible to boil Woolf’s illness down to a series of vivid statements. From childhood she was troubled by moods of intense anxiety combined with physical symptoms like fever, headaches and a racing heart. During the madness that followed her father’s death she attempted suicide by leaping from a window; later she overdosed on veronal and had her stomach pumped. Often she was very depressed and found it hard to eat, and at their worst these spells would be followed by mania so intense that she didn’t recognise even her husband, heard voices, raved unintelligibly, and physically attacked her nurses. The treatment, which she loathed, was soporific: sedatives; bed rest; a restriction in reading, writing, walking and other supposed excitements; and a diet grotesquely heavy in milk and soothing, plumping foods. Indeed, it is largely because of his insistence on this fare that Leonard gained the posthumous reputation as his wife’s jailer as well as her carer.

  Among these lurid titbits of distress, one element is often repeated: that during her second breakdown she ‘had lain in bed at the Dickinsons’ house at Welwyn thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest language possible among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas’. This detail derives from an autobiographical essay, Old Bloomsbury, which was written almost twenty years after the event as a talk for the Memoir Club, a Bloomsbury collective in which members told artfully reconstructed life stories for the amusement of their friends. Its status as verifiable fact is equally artfully unpicked by Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee, who observes in the course of an elegant rereading that Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked poet in Mrs Dalloway who later kills himself, is also subject to hallucinations of sparrows singing in Greek.

  It’s no longer possible to answer the question of whether Virginia lent Septimus her experience, or whether she invented it for him and then adopted it herself. What remains is the sparrows. They might have existed; they might not. Either way, they remain on the page, ambivalent and ecstatic, singing ‘in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.’

  I left the museum then, but on the way up the motte to the castle there was one last reference to the Odyssey. The steps coiled around the edge of a walled garden full of pink and white valerian, the sleep-inducing herb that the Saxons called All-Heal. These steps had recently been rebuilt, and each was carved with the name of a benefactor. Amid the family groupings and cheerful exhortations to keep on climbing, someone had chosen the single line Keep Ithaca always in mind. Ithaca was Odysseus’s destination, but it was not until I returned home that I tracked the quotation to a poem by Constantine Cavafy, the gay Greek poet who had worked for thirty-three years as a clerk in the Egyptian Irrigation Service. And if you find her poor, the poem ends:

  Ithaca has not deceived you.

  Wise as you have become, with such experience, by now

  you will have come to know what Ithacas really mean.

  The bees were working away in the valerian, and though the day was hot clouds were banking up on the horizon, dark below and impossibly clean above. Keep Ithaca always in mind. Say your prayers, keep God in your heart, have faith, persist. But what if Ithaca is no more than the island of the sirens, a place where time stops: a static heaven at the journey’s end? I’d given up faith in a destination, except to be certain that bones do not always stay buried and that I will undoubtedly be outlived by the plastic bags with which my generation has bedecked the globe, as the Romans’ tweezers outlasted their mortal bodies. Forget Ithaca. This is a drowning world, and there is nothing more sobering than regarding the hopes for the future of someone who is already dead. But then perhaps that is what Cavafy means: that Ithacas exist merely to keep us moving and will dematerialise like a rainbow when the journey is complete.

  The shell keep was at the top of the motte, a huge pollarded lime beside it, growing out of a circle of neatly clipped lawn. I went through the doorway and up the precipitous stairs, clinging to the rail like a drunken sailor. There were no tourists; only a couple of pursed-lipped electricians surveying the wiring on the second floor. At the top I stumbled out into the light, and there before me was the town as William Morris described it, ‘lying like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalky hills’. The river slipped like solder through the fields, and on the other side of the narrow valley through which it passed the Downs rose up again in what was virtually a cliff of exposed chalk, which generations of jackdaws had riddled into holes to hold their courts.

  I looked seaward, propping my arms on the rail and gazing out past the roofs of the town and the flickering traffic of the A27. The Levels lay cupped between the hills, flashed with tiny streams, the river carving a snake’s undulating path through lush water-meadows that barely skimmed sea level. I counted the hills I knew by name: Malling Down, Mount Caburn, Firle Beacon, Blackcap, Beddingham Hill with its two dewponds, the Red Lion and the White. The hills in the west defeated me, though dead ahead I could see the strange hump of Upper Rise, which was once an island riddled with rabbit warrens. At my back was Offham Hill with its bald chalk flank, and behind it Mount Harry. A watcher posted here could have seen Prince Edward’s troops ride out at dawn across the Paddock, and caught them later plunging through the Wallands in pursuit of their poorly armed and horseless quarry.

  The landscape had the look in the morning light of something permanent, but its appearance was deceptive. Since the beginning of time it had been undergoing the kind of slow-paced, inexorable change that raises hills and carves out cliffs and valleys. All the world is subject to this sort of flux, which goes on beneath our feet and is only rarely discernable to the eye. But there was, as I had dimly seen the night before, another agency working its will on the valley. Man had been fidgeting away here ever since he arrived: man with his picks and his shovels; his restless mind.

  Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years before the birth of Christ, the first early humans wandered in from what is now Europe, travelling by foot across the land bridge that would later be obliterated by the rising seas of the English Channel. At first these humans left no lasting traces on the landscape, but by something like 4000 BC a change in the valley’s pollen record shows that the wildwood was beginning to be cleared. Pollen is a remarkable record of man’s activity. In addition to exhibiting a great variety in architecture and ornamentation, it is unusually resistant to decay and can be preserved for millennia if trapped in acidic or waterlogged soil. Samples retrieved from peat at the base of Mount Caburn suggest the Downs were covered then by a dense lime forest that was gradually being coppiced or cut down by early pastoralists and farmers. Pollen from the cereals they cultivated has also been preserved, invisible to the naked eye, within the dark lenses of peat deposited by the
river.

  Time inched on. The wildwood disappeared, tree by tree, as forests have a tendency to do. The Romans came and went, leaving their urns of ash, their rational roads. Lewes was built in the Saxon era, on a grid pattern with narrow flint-walled twit-tens dropping away from the high street. A market was held there, and two mints; sometimes the skeletons of its inhabitants are found by metal detectorists in the hills nearby, curled like cats with their swords at their sides. Most of the villages I could see strung out along the river like beads on a rosary – Iford, Beddingham, Rodmell, Southease and Tarring Neville – were named in the Domesday Book and had been established long before the Normans came and built their castles, and filled them, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it, with devils and evil men.

  In this dark, almost ungraspable period the lower Ouse was in all probability a vast tidal estuary, much wider than it is today and edged with vagrant, half-illusory channels that riddled through the mudflats. The river passed on its meandering way to the sea through salt marshes full of wild birds, which were themselves flanked on either side by fertile alluvial soil built up into terraces by centuries of silt deposition. The Saxons were a seafaring people and it seems from the records of Domesday that those who settled here were engaged in the herring industry, sailing to the North Sea spawning grounds to catch the teeming sea-coloured fish in drift nets, for the tithes these tiny hamlets produced equal those of some of the richest East Anglian towns.

  Marshes mark the boundary between land and sea, and marsh dwellers earn their living in both directions. In Rodmell they made salt, cooking it from cakes of silty soil in coarse ceramic pans known now as briquetage, while at Iford there were two watermills, both long since tumbled down. The villages also depended on farming, but even this owed a debt to the river, for it seems that though the high downland was used for pasture, crops were grown lower down, on the alluvial slopes, while the hay to feed oxen through winter was harvested from the dank meadows that lined the water’s edge.

  By the end of the Saxon era the practice of reclamation known as inning was prevalent in England’s marshes, and it seems likely from the abundance of meadows recorded in the valley by the Domesday scribes that it had begun in earnest here by the time King Harold was killed on the bloody fields of Battle, not twenty miles away. With his death time snaps into focus, for if the relics of the Saxon era are fragile or have a tendency towards corrosion, those of the Normans are more solid and abiding. The tower I stood upon had been assembled by Norman hands, and if I looked south I could make out the priory they also built, which was once the size of Canterbury Cathedral and was ruined not by time or weather but as a consequence of Henry VIII’s cataclysmic break with Rome.

  After the Conquest marshland began to be more systematically reclaimed, and what happened in the Ouse valley is matched by work across the country, including the Somerset Levels, Romney Marsh and the Lincolnshire and Norfolk Fens. During this period ditches were dug to dry the land, and in time walls, banks and sluice gates were also built to pen the rivers in. Ironically enough, these works often had the opposite effect. The beaches of the English Channel are subject to longshore drift, the term given to the movement of shingle by the prevailing wind and tide. These shifting beaches have a tendency to close up the mouths of rivers, but before the marshes were inned their formation was countered by the fact of tidal scour. Estuaries tend to carry a considerable quantity of water, and on the ebb tide this great flux of liquid rushes through the river’s mouth, scraping away the gathering glut of stones. With the drainage of the marshes this scouring power was inevitably reduced, and by the early medieval period a drifting shingle spit had forced the mouth of the Ouse from its natural exit at Newhaven three miles east to Seaford. As a result, the river began to take an increasingly tortuous course, and at the same time to slowly fill with silt.

  From the beginning of the clearance of the forests, thousands of years before, the river had suffered from sedimentation, and now, as it grew progressively more shallow, so it became increasingly vulnerable to damming by reeds and waste, meaning that spring tides or heavy rains led almost inevitably to the banks being breached. With such conditions, it’s not perhaps surprising that by the late Middle Ages much of the valley was underwater either permanently or when tides were high. The land was barely above sea level, and a marsh is after all a marsh not out of spite or stubbornness but because it’s situated where water collects. Upper Rise and Lower Rise, the two odd tumps of greensand that stand in the centre of the Brooks, were in that period rabbit-infested islands, and most of the cow-grazed fields I could see from the castle would have been wishes, from the Old English wisc or marshy meadow: at best waterlogged, at worst submerged. As for the Archbishop of Canterbury, who owned 400 acres near Southerham, he shrugged his shoulders and converted his fields into a permanent fishery: bream being more amenable to submersion than corn or sheep.

  Then there was the matter of the weather. In the Roman period the sea level was a good six feet lower than it is today, and the Sussex coast probably extended a mile further out. By the Middle Ages, the sea began to rise again, causing intense problems for coastal villages. With the rising tides there came upon Europe a period of terrible storms, and it was during this time that the towns of Winchelsea and Dunwich began to vanish beneath the waves. The unrest persisted in brief cycles for more than a century and a half, and can be tracked through faltering harvest records and the anxious chronicles of the monasteries.

  The destruction caused by these storms could be considerable. One of the most severe took place in the spring of 1287, when Edward I had come to the throne and was working to expel the nation’s Jews. By morning the sea had completely rearranged the eastern Channel coast, landlocking some towns and turning others into harbours overnight. The town of Old Winchelsea, which had been broken up piecemeal by the sea for decades, was conclusively drowned that day, and if anything remains of its two churches and fifty inns it is hidden beneath the massive sweeping expanse of Broomhill Sands, where the kite surfers like to play.

  Something had to be done, and in 1422, in the wake of the infamous St Elizabeth Flood, which devastated the south coast and took perhaps five thousand lives in the Netherlands besides, the first Commission of Sewers was appointed for the Ouse. These bodies were gradually becoming prevalent in marshy regions and they functioned as a kind of water police, investigating ‘the annoyances and defects of repairs of sea-banks and walls, publick streams and rivers, ditches and marsh-grounds’. In 1531 an Act of Parliament granted the commissions extensive powers as guardians, empowering them to collect a tax from landowners known as a scot, and to use these funds for the upkeep of their region’s drainage. Furthermore, persistent misdemeanours could be tried in special courts, which had the right to order fines by way of punishment.

  I’d seen in the county archive at the bottom of the hill some of the account books and records kept by the local commissioners of sewers, written in a multitude of hands and upon a multitude of papers. The earliest records are lost, but though the quill gives way over time to the typewriter certain words are repeated through the centuries until they take on almost the appearance of an incantation or a prayer. Over and again I read cast, cleanse, widen, draw, raft, shoreset: in other words dredge out weeds, dig clear the clotted bottoms of sewers and reinforce the embankments where they have begun to crumble and slip, that we may grow our crops, God willing, in the land we have wrung from the river.

  But it was the Devil’s own job, draining that valley. You might as well have used a sieve. Around the time that Lord Thomas Cromwell was engaged in tugging down the nation’s monasteries he received a letter from Sir John Gage, one of the local commissioners, that gives a sense of how desperate local people were becoming. ‘The Levell of Lewes,’ he writes, ‘yet be in great rewyn and continually under water in winter, and for the most parte lykwyse in somer . . . my Lord Prior of Lewes sailed to Flanders to view and see things there . . . also we sent for him that inned the Mar
she beneathe Saynte Katherins, and had his advise.’

  By 1539 the needs of shipping as well as farming had become pressing, and so the commission decided that a channel should be cut through the shingle spit to force the river back out at Newhaven. This allowed the barges hauling Wealden iron and wool to reach the sea without running aground, but it didn’t take long for the shingle to build up again, for though a pier was put up it was unaccountably set on the eastern side of the river and so did nothing to prevent the shingle, which drove in from the south-west.

  It took the Georgians, those rational thinkers, to puzzle out what needed to be done. In the mid-eighteenth century, after another series of floods and an abortive experiment with lock gates near the river’s mouth, which were rapidly pulled down for want of repair, a civil engineer was invited to view the valley. John Smeaton came fromYorkshire, began as an instrument maker and shifted by degrees into becoming the foremost engineer of the Industrial Age. Over the decades he designed bridges, harbours, watermills, lighthouses and canals; even a diving bell. His very first engineering contract had been to drain the boggy reaches of Lochar Moss, and the problem of turning fens and marshes into profitable land would occupy him throughout his life. As a young man he’d travelled to the Low Countries to research hydraulic drainage, applying the tricks he learnt there years later to the three great fens of his native county: Potteric Carr, Adlingfleet Level and Hatfield Chase. By the latter part of the eighteenth century Smeaton was much in demand as a drainage expert and during the damp June of 1767 he was asked by the commissioners to survey the Ouse.

  His proposals were ambitious. One plan was to build a canal alongside and sometimes underneath the Ouse that would conduct excess water directly to the sea: a prohibitively expensive scheme. The other, cheaper, suggestion was to straighten the river by a series of cuts, dredging it clear and building up the banks until it resembled and functioned like a canal, with a gated outfall sluice at the river’s mouth that would prevent the tide from rushing in. It was this latter plan that found favour, but in keeping with the air of hesitation and haphazardness that seemed to attend all work on the river, the work proceeded only haltingly for the next twenty years.