To the River

by Olivia Laing

  The continuity he did believe in was of an earth-bound kind. In 1939, as the war approached, Virginia once called him in from the garden to listen to Hitler on the radio. He refused, shouting back: ‘I shan’t come. I am planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’ He was right. A few of the irises were still blooming in the apple orchard in the spring of 1966, and he mentions them in the final line of Downhill All the Way. They smelled exquisite, Trekkie observed elsewhere: ‘a very violet coloured smell’ that seemed stronger than those grown by other people.

  I took his point. ‘Naturally,’ says the Catholic Encyclopaedia on the subject of heaven, ‘this place is held to exist, not within the earth, but, in accordance with the expressions of Scriptures, without and beyond its limits. All further details regarding its locality are quite uncertain. The Church has decided nothing on this subject.’ Not within the earth: no, of course not. Not within this singular globe, whose evening skies are lit sometimes Mars violet or pink or mauve and filled often with flocks of birds that can in their passing bring down a plane. A plague upon your paradise, to place it without and beyond. I’ll stick here, for my money, and when I’m dead I shall be done, meat for worms, and the tangled grasses can make free upon me, green and greenish-blue and sometimes gold.

  The light, I saw then, was striking Christ’s raiment, which had been coloured in shades of red: garnet red, vermilion, cherry red and cinnabar. His staff was brown and behind him the sky was pieced together from petals of Prussian blue. This window had been made in the 1850s, during the great boom in British stained glass, but something had gone wrong during the process. When the panes came to be fired the colours didn’t quite fuse, perhaps because the furnaces weren’t hot enough or else because there was an error in the mixing of the paint. Over the years the pigments were being shed almost imperceptibly, the glass returning stage by stage to its native translucence. Already the stylised yellow flowers had begun to erode, and a portion of Christ’s beard seemed to have been shaved clean away.

  The light dropped white from heaven and as it passed through the window it became instead a flood of transmitted colour intermixed with dust, so that it seemed for a moment that Newton was right: that multitudes of unimaginable small and swift corpuscles of various sizes were springing from shining bodies at great distances one after another; but yet without any sensible interval of time; and continually urged forward by a principle of motion; now indigo, now yellow, now the saturated red of wine or blood.

  On the way down to the water I stopped for a minute on the green to read the notice board: the adverts for open gardens and church concerts; a request for a mellow room-cum-studio from a Mature Pro Man, writer and herbalist, non-smoker, loves dogs. The sky had cast again and the air was tipsy with the scent of roses. There was only a handful of houses in the village but each, I knew from previous open gardens, had wonders concealed behind its walls: a swimming pool reached via a tunnel of pink climbing roses; a maze of box hedges packed with delphiniums, larkspur and a riot of sweet peas. The manor house at the top of the hill sometimes sold tree peonies and just along from the church there was a nursery run by a retired notary who specialised in the breeding of hellebores, those poisonous Lenten roses that produce drooping flowers of green or pinkish-white, and sometimes plumred and pale grey. It was too late for hellebores now. This was the month of the true rose, and the swags and stands let fall their scent as voluptuously as incense swung from a censer.

  As I passed through the fields to the river the cows were lying down in the sun and the marsh frogs in the ditches called out their mocking cry, though I could not make out if what they said was brook brook brook or crook crook crook. I hunkered down to see if I could spy any little green-gold heads peeping from the slime and caught one in the act of croaking, its vocal sacs swelling massively from its cheeks like greyish bubble gum. The mist had isolated the valley, sealing Lewes and Newhaven behind walls of dense white air. The tide was running very low under Southease Bridge, and two kayakers had got caught there, poleaxed on the current. No good mate, can’t do it, one shouted, and as I passed above them the other called back I was absolutely flying along! No wonder. The river was a good thirty feet wide here and the water sped beneath the bridge brown and glossy, riffled down the centre in a long swirling line of foam. Every now and then a pat broke off and drifted back along the bank on a sleepy counterflow. The high-water mark was lathered with seaweed and the wind – I sniffed hard – carried with it a juicy whiff of brine.

  The sea was changing everything. The low tide had exposed ledges of silky mud, pitted here and there with puddles, that a gang of herring gulls worked over for worms. A little further on I came across a motionless flock of black-headed gulls, set down like toys on the bank, their heads all pointing north. The plants were shifting too: the mugwort and grasses replaced by lesser sea spurrey and marsh wormwood, their foliage a pale glaucous green that withstood the constant salt.

  In a field beside the river a single lapwing was patrolling and I paused to watch it work. It was a very regular bird. It tottered forward six paces and then stopped dead. After a moment’s contemplation it turned sharply through ninety degrees, and took another six-step run. Then it jerked to a halt and pecked briskly at the ground. Oop, it was off again: a rush of four steps, a pause, another five, like a clockwork bird that seemed always on the verge of running down. Flapwings, I call them to myself, for when they fly their chunky wings fall open like the pages of a book. Just then a heron lifted out of the reeds and turned a ponderous half-circle across the field, voided its bowels in a shower of white and glided across the river, its massive wings teetering minutely on the breeze.

  The tide was still flowing out. Now there was a little egret on the bank, as skinny and delicate as a Japanese drawing, picking its way along the very rim of the water. It used its wings for balance, and its sharp head jutted forward with every muddy step. I spotted another in the air ahead, yellow feet pointed out behind it like a dancer’s, so white it made the sky seem grey. It’s a Johnny-come-lately, the little egret. Its traditional habitat encompasses southern Europe, Africa and Asia, but in the second half of the twentieth century it shifted its range north through France and the Netherlands, reaching the south coast of England about twenty years ago, much to the delight of ornithologists.

  Not all aliens receive so warm a welcome. As the language suggests, there’s a touch of xenophobia about plant and animal immigration, particularly when the species in question arrives not of its own accord but because it’s been introduced by man. The fiercest opprobrium is reserved for those invasive types – grey squirrels; Japanese knotweed; American mink; Himalayan balsam with its scent of cheap perfume – that are charged with threatening the balance of indigenous flora and fauna, though I’ve also heard environmentalists rail against the pretty sycamore, which was introduced in the sixteenth century and has thus resided in these islands longer than many Britons. It’s a controversial subject, and the rhetoric can reach pitches of outrage more commonly associated with the Daily Mail on the subject of asylum seekers caught renting Surrey mansions on housing benefit.

  I once saw a mink in the Ouse. I was rowing down from Isfield Bridge one August with my friend Tony in a small inflatable boat the colour of custard. We were making a great deal of noise, since rubber boats that lack rowlocks are not the most efficient way to travel, when he noticed a dark head watching us from the bank. The creature was the size of a cat, with sleek, glossy fur. After a moment or two it slipped unfussily beneath the surface and reappeared on the other side, gazing up at the boat. Then it dived abruptly and crossed again, rising shallowly this time so that we could see right down its body to the tip of its broad tail. It seemed an alert and playful creature, confident without having the unnerving cockiness of a rat. But these American mink, escaped or released by activists from fur farms, have decimated populations of water voles, which are critically low in Sussex and indeed across the country.

  As for Him
alayan balsam, it grows abundantly all along the upper river, bringing forth in summer those pouting flowers that give it the nickname Policeman’s Helmet. The nectar is intensely sweet, luring bees away from other bankside plants, while the pods disperse their cargo so aggressively that they can be flung some twenty feet. If you want to give a friend a shock, persuade them to hold one of the ripe green capsules, for the heat makes it burst in the hand with a horribly pleasurable recoil. The dense groves shade out other competitors, and hacking it back in summer is lethal as the seeds are shaken into the water to migrate downstream and start their colonies anew.

  After the incident with the mink, I went to see the Otter Officer at Sussex Wildlife Trust, who in the course of our conversation described the Ouse valley as a desert. I understood what she was saying. I understood that the landscape had previously been richer and more intricate, that the roads and towns and farms with their polluting outfalls of chemicals had decimated the indigenous wildlife. I admired the work they were doing: the restoration of habitats, the tireless efforts to protect the water vole and black poplar, to encourage back the otter. Still, I was wary of her language, for there is a tendency among conservationists to devalue what is common or thriving against what is rare or on the verge of being wholly lost. I hadn’t walked this week through a desert, not by any means, and I didn’t see how it helped to denigrate the ten-a-penny creatures that clung on like grim death in the despoiled valley.

  I wonder if this pervasive human dislike of virulent species, the pests and opportunists, is a kind of projection, if the Himalayan balsam and mink act as a dark mirror in which we catch ourselves: man the destroyer, man the weed. After all, who else is to blame for the great spate of late extinctions? It is man who grubs up habitats; man who trapped, shot or otherwise annihilated in this country the grey whale, the grey wolf, the Great Bustard, the horned dung beetle, the apple bumblebee, the Conformist, the Essex Emerald, the Flame Brocade, the Frosted Yellow, the Gypsy Moth, the Map, the Mazarine Blue, the Reed Tussock, the Swallowtail. If you destroy the habitat of a species, if you kill off the food it depends on – milk parsley, in the case of the Swallowtail – then it is done for. William Burroughs had a nice phrase for it. It no longer has the ghost of a chance.

  Mind you, man will also go to great lengths to lure lost species back. I’d come across a story recently about efforts to reintroduce Great Bustards to Salisbury Plain. These birds were wiped out by hunting in Britain in the nineteenth century and a re-introduction attempt in the 1970s failed because the hand-reared chicks became too tame to survive in the wild, while six vagrants that appeared in Suffolk in the 1980s were shot – accidentally or otherwise – by men out hunting ducks. This time, chicks brought from Russia were being reared using a puppet shaped like the mother bird’s head, while the researchers interacted with the birds clothed in shapeless reflective suits that obscured their human frame. That, right there, seems to me the outer threshold of evolution. When God commanded man to replenish the world, was this really what he had in mind?

  Two redshanks tripped me out of this melancholy line of thought. They stood twenty feet apart and screamed at one another, beaks snapping as they shrieked their piercing pew-pew. I must have frightened them, for they burst simultaneously into the air, revealing a flash of white beneath each dun-coloured wing. The cranes of Newhaven had appeared in the distance behind them, silhouetted against an almighty mackerel sky, the fish’s rib bones clearly delineated, the sun caught within its gut, its tail above Tarring Neville and its head at Telescombe Tye.

  It was just after noon and the tide was on the turn. The surface of the river glittered slightly and on the far bank a train rushed up the valley. Stock Cottages were opposite and I figured I was pretty much exactly in line with where the old Stock Ferry used to run. According to the map a dead channel still passed by the ferryman’s cottage, a vestigial blue line as functionless as an appendix. The ferry itself had apparently run twice daily, taking the farm workers to harvest and back. It was thought to have been drawn by ropes and had once sprung a leak and drowned one Oliver Symons, shepherd, and his flock of fifty-eight sheep.

  The path that runs from here into the Downs is said to be prodigiously old. It felt that way today, in the silent, unpeopled landscape. An occasional fish surfaced and the sun dropped like a blow, the ground beneath it beaten very gold, the dust rising in sheaves from where it had been struck. I felt like I was saying goodbye. I wouldn’t be this alone again, for once I came back from the hill I’d be rushed through Piddinghoe and into the sprawl of Newhaven. I plumped down on a bed of ground ivy and uncapped the water bottle. The river was like glass beneath me, a hawthorn wavering within it. Up above the martins were turning their cat’s cradles through the sky. I could hear the road, but it was an undercurrent to the larger silence of the place. Maybe, I thought philosophically, it was something to do with the turning tide, which opened a natural pause in the day. I drew a deep breath and as I did a grasshopper leapt down my top, bounced out and whacked me smartly on the forehead.

  The track to Piddinghoe led past Deans Farm before breaking uphill across the dry chalk bed of a winterbourne. I climbed past tussocky banks of wild thyme stitched with yellow crosswort and the pale flowers of heath bedstraw. Selfheal and birdsfoot trefoil, which as children we called bacon and eggs, were also growing in profusion, and between them the bees moved in their drunken drifts. The cropped turf was scattered with lumps of chalk and great knotty flints in the shape of roots or teeth. I kicked one to watch it tumble and dislodged by accident a rabbit’s foot on a shard of bone like a lolly on a stick. The abundance of herbs was making me delirious. I counted as I climbed: plantain, agrimony, silverweed, cinquefoil, the evil-looking bittersweet, which is also known as woody nightshade and bears inverted heads of mauvish petals with thrusting yellow stamens. The sky above the slope was colonised by larks, rising in all directions, their voices as unbroken as the perpetual choirs of monks that are said to have worked in shifts of one hundred an hour to ensure God’s glories never for a moment went unpraised.

  What I couldn’t see were wheatears, those plump little white-bottomed birds once so plentiful in these parts that their trapping became a kind of micro-industry. In 1743, Jeremiah Milles, a young antiquarian who would later become dean of Exeter Cathedral, went on a walking tour through Sussex and, as was then fashionable, produced an account of his journey. He was largely interested in castles and churches, but the hunting of wheatears had evidently intrigued him greatly, for he left for posterity an exceptionally detailed record of their capture.

  I ascended the downs on which I saw cast numbers of traps for wheatears. These birds are about the size of a lark with brown feathers, which have a streak of white in their wings and tails. They are a bird of passage, for they come in the month of June, and go away in September, during which time they are most prodigiously fat and are a most delicious morsel; they are supposed to be the same with the Becaficcos of Italy and Turkey. Their name of wheatears I take to be a corruption from white arse, the rumps of the birds being remarkably white and fat. There are but few parts of England where these birds come, for they frequent only the downs, and are supposed to live upon flies, because they never find anything in their stomachs, though I imagine they eat rapeseed, because I saw many of them flying about it. They are a solitary bird, appearing always single, and are foolish enough to be easily ensnared. The manner of taking them is thus. They cut up two oblong turfs out of the ground in the following shape [and here Milles drew an upturned L]; across one part of this cavity they fasten a small stick with two horse hair springs to it and then cover some part of the cavity with one of the turfs in this manner [and here Milles drew a horizontal line across the upturned L] but so the light may appear at each end. These birds hop about from turf to turf, and when the least cloud eclipses the other end, they make towards it and are caught in the springs. These traps are laid in rows all over the downs, at the distance of two or three yards from each other. The
owner of them goes round twice a day to examine and take out what birds are caught. One man has oftentimes a hundred dozen of these traps, by which all the neighbouring country is supplied with birds. They are sold here picked and trussed for about one shilling a dozen.

  At first I found this story hard to credit but a book called Highways and Byways in Sussex confirms it, adding that the wheatears were not killed by the traps but remained within them, caught by the neck and unable to wriggle free, until the trapper – who was usually a shepherd – returned or someone who wanted what had become known as Sussex ortolan for supper took it and left a penny in its stead. During the eighteenth century the birds were hunted in such vast numbers that in midsummer the Downs appeared to have been ploughed on account of the abundance of upturned turfs, which were restored when what was left of the flock returned to Africa each autumn. By 1904, when Highways and Byways was published, the practice had fallen into abeyance, but the author, Edward Verrall Lucas, who was, it might be added, the biographer of Charles Lamb and a prodigious collector of pornography besides, is at pains to explain that larks and goldfinches were still hunted in their thousands on the Downs. To this end he describes a bizarre contraption called a lark glass, which had apparently once been popular in France and which I can’t help but suspect he might have made up.

  The lark glass was apparently made from a triangular length of wood about three feet long and a few inches deep and set with little shards of mirror, which was attached to an iron spindle and rapidly spun by means of a piece of string tugged by a trapper, who sat perhaps twenty yards from the device. The reflection from these revolving mirrors possessed ‘a mysterious attraction for the larks, for they descend in great numbers from a considerable height in the air, hover over the spot, and suffer themselves to be shot at repeatedly without attempting to leave the field or to continue their course’.