To the River

by Olivia Laing

  Caroline texted me then. It was about the cheese, which was required for dinner and which I’d successfully procured in Lewes. God, I was starving. It felt like years had passed since the pizza on the railway lands, and centuries since I last sat down and talked with a friend. I galumphed up the path, slowing only to see if there were any dead magpies in the fields. It wasn’t something I’d ever witnessed, but Caroline swore she’d seen the pied bodies stuck on sticks like scarecrows here. Grisly as this sounded, it’s nothing on a story my mother recently told. She’d been walking in the fields near her house in Suffolk and had come across a tiny cage in which was crammed a dead chicken and a live and frantic magpie. Thinking the bird had made its way in by accident she opened the latch and prodded it out, only to discover later that she’d interfered unforgivably with the local method of trapping. The birds would later be killed by means of an exhaust pipe run into their chamber, and I’d read on a shooting forum that a farmer had reputedly dispatched fifty-two magpies in this manner; one, I thought grimly, for every week of the year.

  Poor magpies. Hunters also use the dead as lures, propping the corpses in a field or dangling them from a fence to reel in the flock, though it’s important that their wings are broken and flapping freely for this trick to work. Other techniques include placing a full size owl decoy on a post for the birds to attack, or half-filling a film canister with pellets, which if shaken in the characteristic six short, one long trill pattern can produce a rough simulacrum of the magpie’s call. It is said that a human should be veiled when hunting magpies, for they are acutely sensitive to the shape of the head, and gun shops sell for this purpose a piece of cloth known as scrim.

  I couldn’t see any birds, either dead or alive, but there were animals grazing on either side of me: sheep to the right and cattle to the left. After a while the sheep gave way to a herd of scruffy horses and then to a smallholding filled with rubbish. There were chickens scratching about between rows of vans and horseboxes, and in one of the dank little sheds a tethered dog barked and barked in a weary, unstoppable way that suggested it had been there for a very long time and didn’t hold much hope of leaving soon.

  Navigation Cottage was on the corner of the village, a few doors down from Monks House. Fly saw me from her sentry post on the garden wall and raced to the gate, carolling her delight with that piercing, unlovable song with which the Jack Russell has been blessed. I delivered the cheese and then went to put my bag in the garden room. It was cool and silent in there, the half-pulled blinds filtering the light to a steady grey. I dropped down on the bed and drew the sheet over my legs. Two minutes, I thought, closing my eyes, and it was 7.30 before I woke again.

  We drank beer in bottles with our dinner, sitting in the kitchen on opposite sides of the long table. There were Puy lentils to go with the cheese, those smoky earth-coloured lentils that taste sweetly of the soil. The house at its end gave into a room made of glass, which at that time had no curtains or blinds and was filled with the last of the sun. The dog bounced between our feet and then, sulking, sidled to the sofa and coiled there, a small, speckled comma turned emphatically from us. The beer had knocked me for six. I was so tired I could barely speak, despite my stolen nap. It may not even have been dark when I went back through the garden to bed, walking barefoot across the dry grass, the smell of lavender and stocks lifting in waves through the cooling air.

  There was a shelf full of battered Penguins by the bed and I hesitated for a while, half-dressed, over Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Music for Chameleons, but the need to sleep had become overwhelming. I left the window wide and as I dropped away the little room swelled with the scents of summer. The temperature plummeted in the night and at dawn I woke briefly and fumbled a second eiderdown from the cupboard. At nine o’clock I came to again, and lay for a while swaddled in my nest, listening to a blackbird calling out its trilling song in stops and starts. After a little while I drew the last of the OS maps from my pack and unfolded it across my knees.

  The official path – the Ouse Way that I’d been following more or less loyally since I left Slaugham a week before – seemed to ditch the river to swoop briefly up into the Downs between Southease and Piddinghoe, passing Deans Farm at the foot of Money Burgh. I didn’t mind that, but the stretch by the coast was bothering me. The Ouse gives out at Newhaven, where the ferries cross over to France, but the path sheered off just shy of the terminal, abandoning the water to follow the old medieval riverbed east as it snaked parallel to the beach along Seaford Bay to where the houses of Seaford began. There was a nature reserve down there, caught between an industrial estate and the A259, and the abandoned village of Tide Mills, which had over the years been a working mill, a sanatorium and a racing stables before crumbling into ruins on the edge of the beach.

  I couldn’t decide which way to go: whether to follow the river to its industrial end or to take the path’s guide and veer east by the ghost bed through which it once ran. I drew a finger lightly down the page. Either way I’d be home tonight, and in a rush the feeling that had come over me in Lewes returned, the wish to slip backwards, counter to the current, as the Ouse grew by progressions narrower and more flashy, until I was at last swallowed up in the steep ghylls and woods of the Weald, the hidden land. Instead, I would be flushed out on a Saturday into the streets of Newhaven, City of the Dead as Woolf once called it. There were two lighthouses marked at the river’s mouth, one at the tip of the long curving breakwater and the other dotted like an exclamation mark at the end of the shorter East Pier. I’ll wing it, I decided: I’ll leave it to my feet to choose their path, but the decision was unsatisfactory and niggled me at intervals throughout the day.

  We ate eggs and toast in the kitchen and I drank down two cups of coffee before I could summon the energy to leave. The little dog followed me to the gate and howled as I walked away, a noise entirely disproportionate to her size. The air smelt of roses and the sky was very blue above Rodmell, though the valley below was once again brimful with mist. Firle Beacon was blotted out entirely, and the other hills were reduced to faint looming shadows until the sun grew hot enough to burn them free. I strolled through the churchyard, stopping beneath the rookery ash to peer over the wall at the lawn behind Monks House where Virginia and Leonard had once played their intensely competitive games of bowls. The path to the road cut up between allotments and gardens and as I passed a run of houses I could hear a woman shouting Ella! Ella! Get back here!, though whether to a child or a dog I couldn’t tell.

  The verge was bursting with poppies: red field poppies, mauve opium poppies and frilly-headed pink poppies, escapees from a garden, their elegantly crumpled petals absurdly frivolous amongst the mallow and the yarrow. The smell of roses had given way to that of warm earth, as edible as cake, and I could hear lifting over the hill the sound of bicycles and wood pigeons, a lawn-mower in the distance: that lulling summer music that makes the countryside seem sometimes as if it has been islanded in time a century back.

  It was Leonard who was on my mind that morning. After Virginia died he returned to London and stayed for a time in a block of flats in Clifford’s Inn. It was full of people, as a hive is full of bees, and he found the compression of lives unbearable and so returned to the bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square, and lived there like a squatter, though there were no ceilings or windows, the roof was unsound and the rooms were contaminated with a litter of soot and rubble. ‘I got my loneliness and my silence all right,’ he wrote years later: ‘But I have experienced few things more depressing in my life than to live in a badly bombed flat, with the windows boarded up, during the great war.’

  It was around this time that the bombsites of the city began to fill with flowering weeds that grew in great profusion among the mangled churches and destroyed streets: the pyrophile rosebay willowherb, which is known also as fireweed for its ability to colonise cleared ground, each single plant dispensing somewhere in the region of 80,000 almost weightless seeds; buddleia, beloved by butterfl
ies for its honeyed scent and suffused purple; Atlas poppy; gallant soldiers; dandelion; Canadian fleabane; Oxford ragwort, which grew first on the ash-strewn slopes of Mount Etna and was introduced in the sixteenth century to Oxford Botanic Garden, from where it escaped and headed south by way of the railways. ‘London is gayest where she has been the most blitzed,’ a New York newspaper reported in 1944, adding that the willowherb ‘sweeps across this pockmarked city and turns what might have been scars into flaming beauty’.

  It wasn’t the first time the city had flowered from its own ruin. London rocket, Sisymbrium irio, which the Bedouin smoke to cure chest infections, is said to have begun to grow in abundance in the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, when the city’s core was gutted by flames, though it later became very rare, returning centuries later when the Blitz opened up the pastures of wasteground again, the weed rising up in wales of colour between the ribands of shattered walls. ‘Walls, roadsides and waste places,’ writes Stace, ‘naturalised in a few places in Br and Ir, a more frequent casual, especially wool-alien.’

  These chance recurrences: mark them. All times are not the same time, but they are all going towards the same end. The London rocket returns in our cities as a clock returns to midnight. The rosebay willowherb swells up through the ruins of law courts and cathedrals, the dandelion marches across battlefields and infiltrates the gardens of mansions. Gallant soldiers, Oxford ragwort, Atlas poppy: these weeds have come and will come again, time immemorial, time without end. It is as well to remember this, for humans believe against all evidence in stasis, though the history of the world does clearly testify that it is rot and regeneration that will be our lot.

  None of this would have been news to Leonard, who had watched men hanged in Ceylon and whose motto was Nothing matters, later amended to Nothing matters, and everything matters. He spent his life struggling against the various forms of desolation and disorder at work in this world: a humane, fiercely moral man who believed in civilisation without ever forgetting that human greed and stupidity made its existence precarious if not actively doomed.

  After the grim, gruelling year that followed Virginia’s death, regeneration of a sort did come for Leonard. He fell in love with a married artist, Trekkie Parsons, and she, luckily, loved him wholeheartedly back, though she never left her husband and parcelled her energy and affection between the two men until Leonard’s death in 1969. Dearest Tiger, he called her, and bought her extravagant, coddling gifts: figs and strawberries, a Rembrandt etching, armfuls of hyacinths and lilacs from the garden at Monks House, a pretty emerald ring. It’s a blessing that he found this late flowering love, for the period before she arrived was purgatorial. Hunting through the Monks House archive for something else I once came across a photocopy of a piece of paper on which he’d scrawled:

  They said: ‘Come to tea and let us comfort you.’ But it’s no good. One must be crucified on one’s own private cross. It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & and yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness.

  The thought of this good man left so alone is heartbreaking, though it cannot be said that Leonard was a saint. Despite his native sympathy with the underdog, he had an odd and vehement dislike of mental disability, once commenting of Virginia’s half-sister Laura, who was described by the family as mentally defective and who had been shut away in a succession of nursing homes at the age of twenty-two or three for more than fifty years, that her death would have been preferable to that of George Duckworth, the half-brother who abused Virginia.

  This harshness resurfaces in a distressing story relayed in The Journey Not the Arrival Matters, concerning the family of his housekeeper, Louie Mayer. Louie’s mother had a severely handicapped son, Tony, whom she adored and who – or so her older son Harry told Leonard – ‘was really destroying her health and all happiness by her devotion’. Harry asked Leonard to intervene and eventually, just before the war broke out, he managed to convince her to have the boy admitted to a home. Later the family became alarmed that he was losing weight and insisted he was removed amid allegations of mistreatment. Leonard helped again, but he wrote disparagingly of their wild accusations, before adding tersely that the child died a week or ten days later.

  ‘There is something horrible and repulsive in the slobbering imbecility of a human being,’ he observed, as he attempted to unpick why the incident had proved so disturbing. But despite these views, which no doubt seem more shocking to our age than to his own, Leonard laboured throughout his life in the service of those less privileged than himself. Nor did Louie bear any sort of a grudge. She worked for Leonard for thirty-six years, and when he became ill in his eighties fought off the ambulance men who came to take him to hospital, instead nursing him herself with the help of Trekkie so that he could stay in his own beloved house. ‘Eventually we had to have the help of two nurses and then the time came when no drugs or special treatment would do anything for him,’ she wrote. ‘But I stayed with him every day until the end.’

  I had reached by this time the steep dark lane that led to Southease. The little round-towered church was at the top of the village, sheltered by a horseshoe of magnificently shaggy elms. As I crossed to it through the graveyard I saw a couple weeding together amid a foaming sea of cow parsley. There was no one inside, and the nave had about it that particular stillness that is found only rarely, in small and rural churches, which seem by some knack of architecture or composition to have caught and held within their stones year upon year of plainsong and prayer. The building was very simple. The walls were white, the floor corroded tiles and the roof a series of vaulting beams that looked not dissimilar to the upturned keel of a boat. The traces of paintings were just visible on the plaster of the north wall: a few parallel lines in dusty ochre; the smurred outlines of human figures. The ones on the chancel arch were in better nick: a puffy cherub that looked in the late stages of jaundice and beneath it a quote from Psalm 75, the first line eroded down to God is the judge he, the second to down one, and the last to the single word another.

  A friend of mine once sang an Ave Maria in here and it was as if the notes still held, the choirboy Latin of that old prayer lifting and shimmering amid the motes of dust. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I hadn’t said those words for a long time, funerals aside, and I wasn’t about to start thumbing a rosary through the decades of Joyful Mysteries and Sorrowful Mysteries. But I genuflected clumsily as I slipped into a pew, for though my belief is not intact I think there’s much to respect in the habits of praise. I didn’t kneel, but I prayed, head bowed, the simple prayer of thank you, the first that I was taught.

  The Lord was depicted on the stained-glass window behind the altar in his guise as a shepherd, a lamb clutched in his arms, and I remembered as I sat there a sermon I’d read by another shepherd, a Wesleyan, on the subject of grass. His name was Job, and he was quoted in M.K. Ashby’s biography of her father, Joseph Ashby of Tysoe. ‘I’m talking o’ the grass,’ it began:

  Of all the natural gifts of God I thought of grass to talk about. Grass is always with us. It never fails, even in the farming sense. It clothes the whole world as with a cloak. It feeds the beasts and they feed us. Permanent grass is a rest for the thoughts. ‘I lay me down in green pastures.’ The green colour o’ grass rests the eye, the neverfailingness of it rests the anxious mind; and the feel of it is rest for the body in summer season . . . Ay, but that reminds me, grass robs death of its terrors, for who but feels soothed at the thought of the green grass waving over a body that is weary and hurt, and laden with hard and painful memories? When I was young my thoughts would be
too much for me and I’d long to be beneath the daisies; not up in heaven. For that you want newness of spirit. But God in his mercy lets us throw off our weariness and leave it kindly buried beneath the grinsw’d.

  That’s faith enough, is it not? That this little life will be rounded with a sleep beneath the waving grasses, though for myself I might choose a bloom of cow parsley, the flowers arranged in white umbels tinged with green or pink, or a stand of the great masterwort, also known as melancholy gentleman, though it prefers shady places further north than this. I wondered if Leonard would have liked the sermon, for he loved the continuity of nature as deeply as he was immune to the solace of religion. He had no patience with any humbug about an afterlife, and returned from his wife’s funeral in a state as much of rage as grief. ‘He spoke with terrible bitterness,’ wrote his friend Willie Robson, who was staying at Monks House at the time, ‘of the fools who played music by Gluck . . . which promised happy reunion or survival in a future life. “She is dead and utterly destroyed” he said, and all his profound disbelief in religion and its consolations were present in those words. It was impossible to comfort him in his loneliness and sense of loss.’