by Olivia Laing
This spectacle would without a doubt have intrigued Leonard Woolf, who once exploded a rocket in a field so as to watch a vast flock of starlings burst into the air, blacking out the sun. Perhaps I’d come back with a disco ball and see if revolving mirrors had retained their allure. As it was they were all about me: descending larks that dropped as if lowered on a string, wings horizontal, before plunging the last storey of air in one headlong forty-five-degree dive, rolling out all the while their unstoppered phrases of exultation. Not gone yet, they might have been saying, or can’t catch me, for we are more careful with our wild birds now, banning the trapping of all but the most allegedly virulent of pests: the corvids, lesser black-backed gulls, Canadian geese, parakeets and feral pigeons, which may be shot or caught in nets or those cages known as Larsen traps, though these must be provided with food, a perch and water at all times, as well as being checked at least once daily, particularly if a decoy bird is being kept inside. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 is explicit on this last matter, adding that all birds must be killed in a quick and humane manner and that ‘Canada geese held captive prior to being killed must be killed out of sight of other captive birds of the same species’, a nicety that is not extended to the sociable crow or rook.
As I climbed on up the slope, I remembered a poem by Raymond Carver about a decoy bird, a wing-tipped goose that’s kept imprisoned in a barrel by a farmer with ruined skin whose fields are filled with blighted barley. It’s fed all the wheat it can eat and in return it acts as an unwitting lure for other geese, which flock so closely round that the farmer can almost touch their feathers before he guns them down. The narrator of the poem, who has wandered onto the farm while shooting with a friend, looks down into the stinking barrel and never forgets what he sees. The goose stays with him all his life; an emblem, if a living creature can ever be so reduced, of betrayal and loss and need.
There’s something about this poem that makes me think the goose was real, though not everything Carver described in his tight drawl was true. It was written in the 1980s, a few years before he died, so even if it was it must also be dead by now. Perhaps it’s been replaced. Or perhaps the farmer went bankrupt or died himself, in a shooting accident or from the same disease that ring-barked his hands. Either way, it sounds an echo with another bird, this one caught on the page by Hemingway: the crippled green-headed drake trapped at the end of Across the River and into the Trees. This mallard is brought by the dog Bobby to the duck-hunters’ boat, ‘intact and sound and beautiful to hold, and with his heart beating and his captured, hopeless eyes’. The Colonel places him in a burlap bag in the bows, to be kept as a caller or released in the spring, and though it’s the Colonel who dies at the close of the book it’s this imprisoned, helpless bird that remains in the reader’s mind as the lasting symbol of any living creature’s vulnerability in this world.
In the brief lives of birds man finds a parallel for his own condition, and nowhere has this been achieved with more force than by the monk Bede, who spent his days in a monastery in Northumberland praying and writing and calculating the true date of Easter, and who once compared the existence of man to that of a sparrow. The scene occurs during an account of the pagan King Edwin’s conversion to Christianity in A History of the English Church and People and it must stand as one of the most beautiful speeches in the language, though I might add that I like its purpose not a bit.
The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter with your ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.
Passing from winter to winter again. Aye, that seems about the size of it. We’re set down here with no more clue than a sparrow or a lark, arising out of darkness into light and with the knowledge that we may wink out at any time. One thousand two hundred and seventy-four years have passed since Bede died in his Northumbrian monastery, and still we are no nearer to knowing what is to follow or what went before we appeared, each one of us, on this spinning earth.
Bede used this fearful state of affairs to counsel faith in God. Throughout his life, Leonard Woolf preached the opposite creed, and it’s not perhaps surprising that he has also employed animals to do so, for he loved them deeply and was rarely without at least a cat or a dog. His own philosophy – nothing matters – embraced the darkness that followed life, and he thought belief in the false machinery of heaven an act of cowardice. In Growing, he describes a menagerie he kept in Ceylon, and the memory of this fine collection of beasts, which included a pack of dogs, a baby leopard and a deer with a pronounced taste for tobacco, sparks one of his fiercest disavowals of the existence of an afterlife:
I do not think that from the human point of view there is any sense in the universe if you face it with the gloves and the tinted spectacles off, but it is obvious that messiahs, prophets, Buddhas, Gods and Sons of Gods, philosophers, by confining their attention to man, have invented the most elaborate cosmological fantasies which have satisfied or deceived millions of people about the meaning of their universe and their own position in it. But the moment you try to fit into these fantasies my cat, my dog, my leopard, my marmoset, with their strange minds, fears, affections – their souls if there is such a thing as a soul – you see that they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions.
As for Bede and his elaborate cosmological fantasies, elsewhere in his History he takes up the story of a Northumbrian man from Cunningham, who fell sick and while lying near death in his bed was transported – or so he claimed – to the furnaces of hell and thence to the fields of heaven. After receiving this vision the man recovered, much to the amazement of his relations, and became a monk, though until then he had been married. In the remaining years allotted him he liked to retell this tale for its pedagogical value, describing to his audiences the torments and delights that awaited them after death. His hell I couldn’t remember, but his heaven stayed with me, perhaps because it seemed so intensely familiar. It had the appearance, he related, of ‘a very broad and pleasant meadow, so filled with the scent of spring flowers that its wonderful fragrance quickly dispelled all the stench of the gloomy furnace that had overcome me. Such was the light flooding all this place that it seemed greater than the brightness of daylight or of the sun’s rays at noon.’
I’d gained a hell of a height in the last few minutes, ascending to a hedge full of wild clematis, flowering blackberry and the last few racemes of elderflower, the petals crisp and brown where they’d once been daubed with curds of pollen. In amongst the larger plants were tendrils of long-stalked cranes-bill, its leaves a bloody pink, and greater stitchwort, which fell among the darker foliage in a shower of white stars. It was very warm, and I threw my pack down and walked unencumbered to where the ground fell away. There was the Weald, blue-shadowed, and from it came the river, though all I could see of it were two snatches of false blue, the colour borrowed from the sky, which is itself composed of nothing more than gas and scattered light.
There is no possibility of permanent tenancy on this circling planet. It isn’t part of the deal. And though I know no more than Bede, I’ll wager there aren’t any sunlight fields waiting without and beyond, and that should one reach them one would anyway doubtless find, like the warrior Achilles, that it’s better to be the meanest ploughboy on this green earth than emperor of all the dead. This is it, this brief wheeling life, and between darkness and darkness the light of no
on fell on the real, withering blooms with which the chalk had been festooned, and then, as I reached the crest of the hill, it fell on the rolling breakers of the English Channel, which had been lent for that moment the blue of heaven; the colour, as Derek Jarman said in his film Blue, of the terrestrial paradise.
VIII
SALVAGE
THERE WAS A RAT ON THE road down to Piddinghoe, resting on its side, paws tucked primly beneath its chin. It must, I thought, stooping to examine it, have been killed very recently, though I could see no marks of injury upon it. It looked in the pink of health, coat gleaming, black eyes unveiled by the scrim that shortly follows death. A few yards on I found another, thoroughly mangled and reeking to high heaven. They were prodigiously large rats and I wondered if they might be related, if the first glossy individual had been killed while mourning at the grave of a parent or a spouse, though it seemed more likely that it had been feasting upon the corpse when a car swung round the corner and sent it voyaging through the air.
I took the low path to the river, skirting the village and coming out by Piddinghoe boatyard. An old man in a blue shirt was sitting on a deckchair there, eating a sandwich from a plastic tub. As I drew closer I heard him say Mullet. Looks to me like they’re feeding in the mud. He was speaking to a couple standing a little back from the water and as I passed the other man laughed and said You been catching them all before I got here. They stood companion-ably in silence for a while and then began to swap fishing tips, in the slow, halting way that elderly men pass time together. I couldn’t hear all that was said, but some sentences or parts of sentences lifted my way as the first man baited his hook and swung his line into the calm uprushing water. I was after the bass. I use a little – but this word was unintelligible – and catch mullet with a fly. I was getting them at Beddingham, on the river there. Beddingham Reach? Yeah, I sometimes pick up tiny bass on fly. I’ve never picked up a really decent one on the river. Thought we’d give bread a try today. What I normally do, I use white maggot. The woman interjected here, laughing meaninglessly, and then they took their leave, calling Might see you again, bye now as they lugged their own rods up the path.
Big pale clouds were riding overhead, sculpted into scoops that hardened as I watched into cumulonimbi with their threat of thunder. There was a funny riddle about Piddinghoe that I wanted to remember. Something about magpies. Yes, that was it: they shod magpies, fished for moonshine and hung their ponds out to dry. Magpies, it is supposed, were the local pied cattle and hanging the ponds out relates to the process of making whitewash from chalk. As for fishing for moonshine, it derives from one of those rustic excuses used by locals when found with smugglers’ booty. The longer village version tells of a shepherd caught in the act of pulling barrels of pilfered brandy from one of the dewponds that pit the Downs hereabouts. When challenged by the Excise men he cried The moon be drowning, I must fish her out and with this declaration of idiocy succeeded in saving both himself and the booze.
Piddinghoe used to be an isolated little place, in which the main trade was brickmaking, but Newhaven is sweeping ever nearer and the village has long since lost the brickyard, and with it the cobbler and blacksmith, the Royal Inn and the Royal Oak, with only the boatyard to preserve it from becoming little more than a commuters’ outpost. The river was changing too. Three red cranes rose behind Denton and beneath them the suburbs had come into view, the hills covered with the creep of houses that Virginia Woolf once railed against, calling them ‘spot & rash & pimple & blister; with the incessant motor cars like active lice’. Discarded Coke bottles and crumbs of polystyrene were mixed in with seaweed on the shoreline, and above me a reddish kestrel held its place in the air, wings flexed; then, as the breeze turned, rowed fiercely forward for a beat or two before arcing back into its hunting stance.
What could it see among the bladder campion and knapweed, with those fine globed eyes? A mouse? A vole? A tiny and ferocious shrew, itself hard on the heels of a beetle or a slug? It is bedlam down there, in that part-visible world beneath our feet. A shrew sleeps for minutes at a time and if it doesn’t eat twice its own body weight each day it will not survive the night. Imagine living with that kind of hunger: sixteen stone of meat to daily pillage and consume, your single set of teeth wearing to stumps; and when they break you’re done for. Allez-oop. I gritted my own teeth. At least I had some oatcakes and the sweaty remains of last night’s cheese.
The tide had turned while I’d been up on the hill and as I walked towards the cranes the light fell as it had all week on the tangled mirror of the grasses, to be absorbed or flung back to the sky. I could hear a grasshopper fidgeting its song and further out there was a siren testifying to some disorder in the human realm. It struck me as curious then, the idea of a whole town of people attending to their business, a whole town of people driving cars or walking the streets, their faces only partially betraying the magic lantern show that flares in utter privacy within the confines of each skull. Do animals think in these bright spools of colour, I sometimes wonder? Do they walk in their minds through landscapes known and unknown, both during waking hours and within the course of dreams? They do not replay conversations, or add great registers of numbers in their heads, but do they revisit past emotions or think on faces that have gone? It seems astonishing to me how alone man is, though he can touch and talk and gaze on others of his kind. But that picture theatre within his head: no one but he will ever see it played, and there is no medium on earth that can accurately catch its luminosity or speed.
It was the kind of thought I had frequently in the bleak months in Brighton after Matthew had left, when it began to occur to me that the whole story of love might be nothing more than a wicked lie; that simply sleeping beside another body night after night gives no express right of entry to the interior world of their thoughts or dreams; that we are separate in the end whatever contrary illusions we may cherish; and that this miserable truth might as well be faced, since it will be dinned into one, like it or not, by the attritions of time if not by the failings of those we hold dear. I wasn’t so bitter now. I’d begun to emerge into a sense of satisfaction with my lot, but it would be a long time before I trusted someone, for I’d seen how essentially unknowable even the best loved might prove to be.
I’d begun to enter, as I thought these dark things, into the fringes of the port, an industrial no-man’s-land where things in transport were briefly processed or broken into constituent parts. There was a wharf on the far bank and a swooping oystercatcher drew my eye to a building site populated by figures in fluorescent jackets and the red, yellow and white hardhats of Lego men. They had a radio with them but as I tried to make out the song more oystercatchers rose into the air and by the time their clear pew pew had passed the music was gone. A fleet of Palletline trucks was parked by the site, and beyond it a scrap-yard filled with crunched-up cars and glittering mountains of rusting metal gave off in the light the same black-gold glint as the owl’s pellet I’d found in the wheat. I couldn’t make head nor tail of this place, which was furnished with all manner of funnels, chutes and holding tanks. It looked as if it had been abandoned, the machinery branny with dust, but I mistrusted my perception, for I was on the wrong side of the water and gazing towards the sun. These places that are outside the human scale maintain anyway their own kind of invisibility: the eye drifts past them; their purpose is mystifying and their workings hard to name.
The path on my own side of the river had been travelling alongside a patch of wild or waste ground that the map reported was a disused refuse tip, but the land came to an abrupt end then and beyond the Yorkshire fog and the blackening skeletons of cow parsley was a broad lead-coloured side channel filled with gipsyish ranks of trawlers and barges. Many of the boats had peeling paint or were patched with sheets of blue tarpaulin slung over ruined cabins, but despite this air of decay the place was jumping. I passed a woman sprawled on the deck of a houseboat, smoking a cigarette while a black dog stretched out beside her, and fu
rther back I could see other people fiddling with painters or resting dreamily in the sun. A man in a red dinghy had got stuck in the open water between two pontoons and was turning an engine that refused to catch. After a few spluttering tugs he gave it up in disgust and began paddling in with a single oar. A boat! Why didn’t I have a boat? I began to pick out my favourites, settling at last on a little white trawler with four blue portholes and a dinghy tied up at its bow. Dreaming away like this – sleeping in a cabin! Scrambled egg for breakfast! – I walked almost directly into a massively pumped-up man with two Rottweilers whose necks were almost as broad as his. Sorry, I mumbled, and he bowed his head magnanimously at me, like a politician or a king.
The channel must have been one of those old loops of the river that the navvies had sliced through, creating Denton Island. Boys in sports shirts were playing football on the bank, and the noise of their shouts and the barks of the dogs mixed up with the clattering stays of the boats seemed so pure a distillation of the place that I thought I would know it blindfolded. The Ouse Way, which I was still loyally following, left the water then and turned up a road lined with various river-businesses: Cantell and Son, which proclaimed boat repairs, moorings and ship chandlers; Blakes Approved Osmosis Centre with its window full of red and white buoys; Newbury Engineering, boat builders; and among them Bridge Press, fine lithographic printers. Opposite these sheds and barns were the backs of council houses, and the path all of a sudden ducked between them, running up an alley between the yards.