Finding Again the World

by John Metcalf

  His hands were hot and sweaty and a heavy pulse beat in his neck. Leaning on the front gate, he rested for a few minutes before starting on the other side.

  The light was thickening and the houses opposite were becoming shapes against the flushed sky. Shepherd’s delight. Shepherd’s pie. Another fine day tomorrow. He could hear the distant whirr and clack of a lawnmower, and across the road the Romilly girl was practising scales on the piano, the notes falling softly into the evening.

  There was a light, sharp scent in the air, a faintly acid smell. The smell of sap and bruised privet leaves. It seemed to move a memory in him . . . a recollection . . . but he could not remember what it was.

  THE YEARS IN EXILE

  Although it is comfortable, I do not like this chair. I do not like its aluminum and plastic. The aluminum corrodes, leaving a roughness on the arms and legs like white rust or fungus. I liked the chairs stacked in the summer house when I was ten, deckchairs made of striped canvas and wood. But I am an old man; I am allowed to be crotchety.

  By the side of my chair in the border are some blue and white petunias. They remind me, though the shade is different, of my youngest grandson’s blue and white running shoes, Adidas I believe he calls them. They are one of this year’s fads. He wears them to classes at the so-called college he attends. But I must not get excited.

  It is one of her days. The voice of the vacuum cleaner is heard in the land. But I should not complain. I have my room, my personal things, the few books I still care to have about me. Before moving here, life was becoming difficult; the long hill up to the shopping centre for supplies I neither wished to cook nor eat, sheets, the silence broken only by the hum and shudder of the fridge.

  Strange that this daughter of my first marriage, a child of whom I saw so little, should be the one who urged this home upon me. Or not so strange perhaps. I am old enough to know that we do not know what needs compel us.

  The cartons were mentioned again this morning, those in my room and those in the basement. She calls them “clutter,” and perhaps she is right. The papers are promised to Queen’s University but I cannot bring myself to sort through years of manuscript and letters from dead friends. Much of the order of things I couldn’t remember and it is a task which smacks too much of some finality.

  I am supposed to be resting today, for this evening a man is coming to interview me for some literary journal or review. Or was it a thesis? I forget. They come quite often, young men with tape recorders and notebooks. They talk of my novels and stories, ascribe influences I have never read, read criticism to me. I nod and comment if I understand them. I am not an intellectual; I am not even particularly intelligent. I am content to sit in my aluminum chair and stare at the weeping-willow tree in the next-door garden.

  I have lived in Canada for sixty-one years covered now with honours yet in my reveries the last half century fades, the books, the marriages, the children, and the friends. I find myself dwelling more and more on my childhood years in England, the years when I was nine and ten. My mind is full of pictures.

  My sleeplessness, the insistence of the pictures, are familiar signs. Were I younger, I would be making notes and outlines, drinking midnight coffee. But I will not write again. I am too old and tire too easily; I no longer have the strength to face the struggle with language, the loneliness, the certainty of failure.

  I remember my own grandfather. I wonder if I seem to Mary and her children as remote as he appeared to me, talking to himself, conducting barely audible arguments in two voices, dozing, his crossed leg constantly jiggling, the dottle from his dead pipe falling down his cardigan front.

  I remember the bone-handled clasp-knife, its blade a thin hook from years of sharpening. I can see his old hands slicing the rope of black twist into tiny discs, rubbing them, funnelling the prepared tobacco from the newspaper on his lap into his wooden box which stood on the mantelpiece. The mantelpiece had a velvet fringe along its edge with little velvet bobbles hanging down at intervals. I can see his old hands replacing the gauze mantle in the gas lamp, the white-yellow incandescence of the light.

  Many might dismiss such meaningless particulars of memory.

  I know that I am lost in silence hours on end, dwelling on another time now more real to me than this chair, more real than the sunshine filtering through the fawn and green of the willow tree.

  Summerfield, Hengistbury Head, Christchurch, with their rivers, the Avon and the Stour, and always central in my dream and reverie, the spoiled mansion, Fortnell House. Were I younger, I would attempt to frame its insistence.

  Fortnell House.

  A short story could not encompass it; it has the weight and feel about it of a novella. But the time for such considerations is past.

  I have not read much in late years; I lack the patience. But of the younger writers I have read Cary. Thinking of my rivers, my Headland and estuary, the bulk of my great grey Priory above the salt marsh, I looked again not a week since at a remembered passage in his novel To Be a Pilgrim. Old Wilcher speaking. It has stayed in my mind:

  The English summer weighs upon me with its richness. I know why Robert ran away from so much history to the new lands where the weather is as stupid as the trees, chance dropped, are meaningless. Where earth is only new dirt, and corn, food for animals two and four-footed. I must go, too, for life’s sake. This place is so doused in memory that only to breathe makes me dream like an opium eater. Like one who has taken a narcotic, I have lived among fantastic loves and purposes. The shape of a field, the turn of a lane, have had the power to move me as if they were my children, and I had made them. I have wished immortal life for them, though they were even more transient appearances than human beings.

  I, too, have thought myself a pilgrim.

  In the summer, dilapidated farmhouses in the Eastern Townships; in the winter, Montreal’s cold-water flats. My mother’s letters to me when I was young, how they amused yet rankled: “living like a gypsy,” “a man of your age,” “not a stick of furniture to your name.” My early books returned. All so many years ago.

  A blue night-light burns on my bedside table. Mary put it there in case I have need of the pills and bottles which crowd the table-top, Milk of Magnesia, sedatives, digitalis, the inhaler, the glycerine capsules.

  Yes, I have thought myself a pilgrim, the books my milestones. But these recent weeks, the images that haunt my nights and days . . .

  I have seen the holy places though I never knew it. I have travelled on, not knowing all my life that the mecca of my pilgrimage had been reached so young, and that all after was the homeward journey.

  Fortnell House.

  The curve of the weed-grown drive, the rank laurels, the plaster-fallen crumbling portico. Lower windows blind and boarded.

  I read once in a travel book of an African tribe, the Dogan, famed for their masks and ancestor figures. They live, if I remember aright, south of Timbuctu under the curve of the Niger. Their masks and carvings are a part of their burial rites; the carvings offer a fixed abode for spirits liberated by death. The figures are placed in caves and fissures where the termites soon attack the wood and the weather erodes.

  I have seen such weathered figures in museums.

  I stare at my wrist as it lies along the aluminum arm of the chair, the blue veins. The left side of the wrist might be the river Avon and its estuary, the right side the sea. And then my fist, the bulge of the Headland.

  * * *

  Away from the Southbourne beach, away from the sand, the bathers, and the beach games onto the five miles of crunching pebbles towards Hengistbury Head. Scavenging, I followed the line of seawrack, the tangles and heaps of seaware, kelp, and bladderwrack. In my knapsack I carried sandwiches, pillboxes for rare shells, and a hammer.

  Sometimes among the tarred rope and driftwood branches, the broken crates, the cracked crab shells, and hollowed bodies of birds, we
re great baulks of timber covered with goose barnacles stinking in the sun. Scattered above and below the seaweed were the shells, limpet, mussel, periwinkle, whelk and cockle, painted top and piddock. Razor shells. The white shields of cuttlefish, whelks’ egg cases like coarse sponge, mermaids’ purses.

  At low tide, the expanse of firm wet sand would shine in the sun, the silver smoothness broken only by the casts of lugworms.

  The halfway point of my journey was marked by The Rocks. I always thought of them as a fossilized monster, the bulk of its body on the beach, its lower vertebrae and tail disappearing into the sea. The rocks in the sea were in a straight line, water between them, smaller and smaller, and almost invariably on the last black rock stood a cormorant.

  I always liked the cormorant’s solitary state. As I climbed up the rocks, it would usually void in a flash of white and fly off low over the water. My favourite birds were ravens; they nested on the Headland strutting on the turf near the dangerous cliff edge. Cormorant in Latin means “sea raven.” I liked the sound of that; it might have been a name for Vikings.

  I climbed among the rocks looking in the rock pools where small green crabs scuttled and squishy sea anemones closed their flowered mouths at a touch. I usually rested in the shadow of the rocks and used my hammer on the larger pebbles, often those with a yellowish area of discolouration; they broke more easily. I sometimes found inside the fossils of sea-urchins. I dug, too, at the cliff face dreaming of finding the imprint of some great fish.

  Two or three miles past The Rocks I scrambled up where the cliff dipped to perhaps twenty feet before beginning its great rise to the Headland. At this point the Double Dykes met the cliff edge. The Dykes ran across the wrist of land to the estuary on the other side. They were Iron Age earthworks designed to cut the Headland off from attack by land, built presumably by the people whose barrows still rose above the turf and heather high up on the hill. They were perhaps twelve or fifteen feet high from their ditch, still a struggle up slippery turf to gain the other side.

  They must have been much higher 2,000 years ago but were eroded now by time and rabbits; they formed a huge warren and the fresh sandy diggings were visible everywhere. The land beyond the Dykes was low on the estuary side and rose to 180 feet at the point of the Headland. On the estuary side there were woods and pools and marsh and then, as the land rose, short turf, bracken, and heather.

  At the far end of the Dykes, the estuary end, stood the keeper’s cottage. Mr. Taylor was of uncertain temper and had a collie with one eye, and ferrets, and an adder just over three feet long pickled in alcohol. On his good days he showed me the adder or gave me owl pellets; once he let me help with the ferrets.

  Before going along the curve of the estuary into the woods, it was part of my ritual to climb the height of the land and sit beside the larger of the two burial mounds to eat my sandwiches. The Headland behind the Dykes had been a camp for many peoples. Before the legions arrived, some British king or chieftain had even established a mint here. Later, the Vikings, penetrating up the Avon and Stour, had used the Headland as a base camp. Although I knew that the larger barrow was of the Iron Age, or even earlier, I preferred to connect it with Hengist and Horsa, legendary leaders of the first Anglo-Saxon settlers in Britain. According to Bede, Hengist and his son Aesc landed and eventually reigned in far-away Kent. But for me, Hengistbury Head was Hengist’s fort and I imagined inside the larger mound the war-leader’s huge skeleton lying with his accoutrements. An axe and shield, a sword, spears, and his horned helmet. I knew that he was huge because I had read in the encyclopedia that Hengist was probably a personal name meaning “stallion.” I gave alliterative names to his weapons.

  “Bone-Biter” was one, I seem to remember.

  I always poured a trickle of lemonade, wishing I had wine.

  This was my Valley of the Kings.

  Sitting by the burial mound I looked out over the estuary. It curved in at both sides where it met the sea, a narrow run of water between two spits of beach, the salmon run, and then white breakers beyond. On the far side of the estuary mouth was the village of Mudeford, eight or nine houses, one painted black. It was called, simply, The Black House, and in the eighteenth century had been a meeting place for smugglers. It had once been an inn, I believe, but now served teas to summer visitors.

  I used to imagine moonless nights, a lugger standing off, the rowing boats grating up the shingle. The brandy, wine, and lace were taken by the winding paths across the saltings to Christchurch where it was rumoured they were hidden in a false tomb in the Priory graveyard.

  Across the estuary sailed and tacked the white yachts like toys but at Mudeford the fishermen netted the salmon run or put out to sea with lobster pots. Although the run was less than fifty yards across there was no way of getting over and Mudeford could only be approached from the Christchurch side. I used to walk to Christchurch sometimes and then set out for Mudeford at low tide across the saltings, jumping from tussock to tussock, always getting plastered with mud. The knowledge of the paths was lost or they had eroded with the shifting tides. Sometimes I imagined myself a smuggler, sometimes a revenuer, but after I got the cutlass with its brass guard and Tower of London stamp near the hilt from Fortnell House I was always an excise man.

  Behind Mr. Taylor’s thatched cottage, on a triangular patch of land between the back of the house and a shed, grew teazles. After the death of the purple flowers the brown, spiky teazles stood tall and dry in the autumn. Every autumn I cut teazles for my mother. They stood in the Chinese dragon vase in the hall.

  I often wondered if they were chance-sown behind the house so thickly, or if for centuries the cottage people had grown them specially to card and comb the wool from sheep they grazed on the Headland.

  I can still remember the maps I used to draw marking the cottage and the teazle patch, the burial mounds and Dykes, the wood, the estuary and salmon run, The Black House, dotted lines marking the smugglers’ routes across the saltings, to Christchurch Priory and the river Avon in its tidal reaches to Wick Ferry, the nesting sites of the ravens.

  I can see those childish maps now as clearly as I see the petunias by my chair or the willow in the next-door garden. I can remember the names I gave to various areas: “The Heron-Sedge,” “Badger’s Sett,” “Lily-Pad Pond,” “Honeysuckle Valley.”

  Dear God. I can smell the honeysuckle!

  * * *

  A pair of Monarchs chasing each other about the leaves of the apple tree; the lawn is strewn with fresh windfalls. The sun is higher now. The Monarchs will not find milkweed in this garden. Will you, my beauties? No weeds here for you. Robert doesn’t like weeds. Roots them out. Weed-killer and trowel.

  Were it my garden, I would sow it thick with milkweed so that you would always grace me with your presence.

  The windfalls surprise me; Robert will doubtless gather them this evening. He has an oblong wooden basket of woven strips, cotton gloves, a pair of secateurs. He does not know that such a basket is called a “trug.”

  I hug the word to myself.

  Earlier, Mary brought me lemonade. My bladder will not hold liquid as it once did. I have to suffer the indignity of struggling from this reclining chair like a wounded thing to go indoors to the lavatory. She’s still vacuuming, now upstairs. It is cool and dim in the bathroom. I urinate without control and when I have finished and zipped up my trousers, I can feel a dribble of urine wetting my underpants.

  I wonder if my room smells, if I smell? I often remarked it in old people when I was younger. I can remember still the smell of my grandmother. Thank God I will never know. I can, at least, still bathe without assistance though she insists I do not lock the door. Some I remember smelled medicinal, some of mothballs, some just a mustiness. I have not shaved today. I must remember to shave before evening for the young man is coming to ask me questions.

  The cushion for the small of my back.


  The Monarchs have disappeared in search of ground less disciplined.

  I have always disliked Wordsworth. Once, I must admit, I thought I disliked him for his bathos, his lugubrious tone. But now I know that it is because he could not do justice to the truth; no philosophical cast of mind can do justice to particularity.

  I am uncomfortable with abstraction, his or mine.

  I stood one morning in the fierce heat by the Lily-Pad Pond. Two frogs were croaking and then stopped. A dragonfly hovered and darted, blue sheen of its wings. Then I, too, heard it. The continuous slither of a snake moving through dead grass and sedge at the pond’s edge. I knew, being by water, that it would be a grass snake. I stood rooted, staring at the yellow flags where the faint sound seemed to be coming from.

  I had caught grass snakes and adders by the dozen, yet for unknown reasons felt upon me again that awful sense of intrusion, that feeling of holy terror. I stood waiting to see the snake curve into the water and swim sinuous through the lily pads, its head reared. But nothing happened. The snake did not move again. I stepped away backwards from the margin of the pond, placing my feet silently until I was at a distance to turn and walk downhill towards the wider sky and the open light of the estuary.

  Again.

  In the valley of the honeysuckle it was full noon; the bordering wood was dim. As I stepped into the wood’s overgrown darkness over a fallen tree and brushing aside some saplings, the air suddenly moved and above my head was a great shape. I never knew what it was. I was afraid to turn. I felt my hair ruffle in its wind.

  A holiday in Dorset in my tenth year in the Purbeck Hills outside the haven of Poole. The cottage was called “Four Winds,” I remember, and in the garden stood a sundial. I remember the collection of Marble Whites and variants I was netting. I went out every day with net and cyanide jar, happy to wander for hours along the cliff path and across fields.