by Ann Wroe
CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ANN WROE
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
TITLE PAGE
THE WHITE STONE
AMONG THE BIRDS
IN THE BEGINNING
FALLING EARTHWARDS
CATCH AS CATCH CAN
IMMORTAL DIAMOND
NOTES
CREDITS
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
Goethe claimed to know what light was. Galileo and Einstein both confessed they didn’t. On the essential nature of light, and how it operates, the scientific jury is still out. There is still time, therefore, to listen to painters and poets on the subject. They, after all, spend their lives pursuing light and trying to tie it down.
Six Facets of Light is a series of meditations on this most elusive and alluring feature of human life. Set mostly on the Downs and coastline of East Sussex, the most luminous part of England, it interweaves a walker’s experiences of light in Nature with the observations, jottings and thoughts of a dozen writers and painters – and some scientists – who have wrestled to define and understand light. From Hopkins to Turner, Coleridge to Whitman, Fra Angelico to Newton, Ravilious to Dante, the mystery of light is teased out and pondered on. Some of the results are surprising.
By using mostly notebooks and sketchbooks, this book becomes a portrait of the transitoriness, randomness, swiftness, frustrations and quicksilver beauty that are the essence of light. It is a work to be enjoyed, pondered over, engaged with, provoked by; to be packed in the rucksack of every walker heading for the sea or the hills, or to be opened to bring that outside radiance within four dark town walls.
About the Author
Ann Wroe is the Briefings and Obituaries editor of The Economist. She is the author of six previous works of non-fiction, including Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Award and the W.H. Smith Award. She lives in north London.
Also by Ann Wroe
Lives, Lies and the Iran-Contra Affair
A Fool and his Money: Life in a Partitioned Medieval Town
Pilate: The Biography of an Invented Man
Perkin: A Story of Deception
Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself
Orpheus: The Song of Life
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Eric Ravilious: Chalk Paths
William Blake: Night Startled by the Lark
J.M.W. Turner: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of Genesis
Fra Angelico: Annunciation (detail)
John Constable: Cloud Study (1821)
Samuel Palmer: Harvest Moon
This book is a series of musings on light, compiled from wonderings, observations and associations made while walking the luminous Downs of southern England between Brighton and Eastbourne. It is not scientific, and only occasionally philosophical. It is really just a love song to light, sung by myself and the various poets and painters, of many eras, who have walked along with me.
AW
THE WHITE STONE
Sixty miles south of London, reached by an ambling train that divides at Haywards Heath, lies Eastbourne in East Sussex. Weathermen say it is the sunniest town in Britain, with brightness almost every day. Pensioners know this; they have long colonised the place, shuffling in white cardigans and golf shoes past the glacé-icing façade of the Grand, or sitting on the benches by the Martello tower where the marigolds make a show. Everything dazzles, or is bleached out. A man walking a dog across the lawns becomes a radiant ghost of himself. Teapot, cups and spoons blink blindingly on a table. The sea breaking on Holywell Ledge by the westernmost tea chalet sparkles in sequinned foam, and a single yacht – there is always one – cleaves the sea like a blade.
The artist Eric Ravilious was brought up here in the early 1900s, the tall, floppy-haired son of a man who, appropriately, made his living by selling and fitting blinds. On Sundays you might see him – ‘the Boy’, as friends called him later, in token of that unjaded child’s gaze – arm-in-arm with his parents, walking briskly to the Methodist church where the minister preached hellfire. For hours he would sit there, morning and evening, in a hall darkened by infernal visions, watching through the high windows how the light played outside. He would hear above the wheezing organ seagulls crying light, scrapping for it, keening down the great curve of it, while wood-and-canvas biplanes buzzed them and more boats, sails shining, rode jauntily on the sea. Or so he painted the scene later, adding – for good measure – vapour trails, clouds, fireworks.
For there was no getting away from it. If he escaped by bike to the Downs to the north and west of town the air was still saturated with light, like a shout. The whole region was famous for it. When Richard Jefferies, Victorian England’s greatest nature writer, moved his long lean Wiltshire frame in the 1880s to Brighton, twelve miles west of Eastbourne, hoping for health, he was enchanted by the dryness and clearness of the air.1 The place was ‘a Spanish town in England, a Seville’, where light so filled the sky and cascaded off the walls, caressing the blooming, fluttering, laughing girls as it went, that even a northern aspect shone. The sheer ‘champagniness’ of Brighton light, he wrote, ‘brings all things into clear relief, giving them an edge and outline’. Ravilious, cycling out into fold upon fold of clear-edged hills backed by glare, carried Jefferies’s books in his mind or his saddlebag. Aficionados of light and chalk tend, like downland starlings, to flock together.
The combination is too strong for some eyes. Chinese tourists on the Number 12 bus, which plies the coast road, not only don sunglasses and sit on the shaded side but pull their caps over their faces to save themselves. It doesn’t help. Light lords it here and, besides, the land is built from it. Rabbits kick it up from the banks, white scuts jumping in a rubble of white stones. Poppies catch scarlet fire at the field’s edge, each petal glassy with powder of light. Trees are rooted in square-cut walls of it, as if their leaves did not absorb enough from the fiercely gleaming air. Men quarry it; one of Ravilious’s favourite subjects was the Asham cement works near Tarring Neville, dug deep into the Downs, where talcum-light lay in drifts over buildings, dolly engines, hedges and trees.
When the topsoil is ploughed or harrowed light shoulders through, bone beneath skin as delicate as that quarried dust. Real bones also break from it, of rabbit or sheep, or the bleached, strewn ossuaries of birds of prey. Fields that are plain smooth grass erupt with light, in pebbles of chalk or damp mushrooms overnight, with occasional perfect shells flung up by wave and gale, or even with the scattered forms of far sheep grazing – for it is a curious quality of this light that all objects, near or far, are equally intense and clear. The result can be a sense of illusion, almost trickery. W.H. Hudson, another tramper of the Downs favoured by Ravilious, thought he had stumbled once on one of those bright, prophetic fields, singled out by the cloud-fighting sun, where divine words wait to be read: an old ploughed field, it seemed from a distance, completely covered with tall white-campion flowers. But it was only a patch of downland waste strewn with shining flints, blue forget-me-nots misting among them.
In ancient times some downland fields were explicitly dedicated to light. At West Dean, hiding behind a spur of hill barely two miles from the sea, two small pieces, Lampland and Tapersland, were farmed in the fourteenth century to provide candles for the tomb of Isabella Heringod, who slumbers in the church. When Ravilious was teaching at Eastbourne School of Art he would bring his students out here, by bike or bus, to draw. The tiny village, now sunk in woods planted by the Eastbourne Water Board, was then as open to the sky as any other neighbouring place. Fo
r centuries, under that brightness, men laboured to farm the soft white stone, leaving what Hudson called their ‘chance hieroglyphics’ in dips, mounds and plough-ridges.2 And for those who know where to look, as the low light of dawn or sunset reveals their uneven lines in the turf, the chalk hides prehistoric chambers decorated with spiral mazes in which the sun was believed to disappear and go deep, as a man’s spirit lay within himself.
In chalk all the pathways are laid with light, emphasising the sense that they lead to a higher state. John Bunyan, in his Pilgrim’s Progress, was perhaps the first to mention this. Above his own clay plains the chalk Chilterns appeared as holy hills blocking off the divine country, and the white tracks that crossed them as necessary pathways for the pilgrim soul. On these Delectable Mountains, shepherds grazed their flocks; from the high ridges they could point out to pilgrim Christian the Abyss of Error, and Mount Innocent, and Mount Marvel, where they saw ‘a man at a Distance, that tumbled the Hills about with Words’. They could also show him, through their Perspective-Glass, the Gates of the Celestial City.
Chalk in any case was holy in itself, like ‘the Child of God’: white, warm, soft, and moreover, Bunyan wrote,
It leaves a white Impression upon those
Whom it doth touch, be they it’s Friends or Foes.
This purity is seen most clearly at the shoreline. At Hope Gap near Cuckmere Haven chalk stands in great cubes and rectangles, as if cut by a saw; between these it lies in luminescent eggs and spheres, their roundness cupped by gritty sand. Farther out it spreads itself in plateaus and ledges smoothed by the waves into regular scalloped squares, like an ancient courtyard all men have trodden, or will tread, into the milky blueness of the sea.
Some it has embraced are swept back again. In Friston churchyard, a few miles inland to the east, several are buried under a wind-bleached wooden cross engraved only with the words WASHED ASHORE. People have a habit of leaving a few wild flowers there: ox-eye daisies, or buttercups from the glowing field that runs down to East Dean. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean, says the psalm; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
Humble among the old memorials,
a cross of time-grey, weathered, sea-worn wood
and daffodils in grass. They brought him here
for decent burial, as they thought they should.
‘Washed ashore’ the epitaph he’s given.
Nothing more complicated to proclaim –
a resting place for anyone discovered
without a face, or clothing, or a name,
rolled in the unkind breakers like the chalk
fallen from cliffs, but softer, splaying limbs
loose as the seaweed, pebbles in his hair
and seagulls’ fretful squalling for his hymns.
Thus rubbed, reduced, wrung out, his whitened wreck
rocks unlamented on an unknown shore;
or loved, laved, lavendered, is lifted up
in the bright washing he was waiting for.
Bunyan’s Christian cried Selah, the word that punctuates many of the Psalms, to invoke God’s help on his journey, especially the final stage.3 When Ravilious wrote of painting the bleaching and browning of the winter hills, ‘never so exciting as it is this time of year in Sussex’, he added: ‘I’d like to put Selah after this … if the word means what I think it means.’ He thought it meant as good a light as he could hope for.4
With easel and brown canvas satchel he walked the chalk paths daily in the mid-1930s, heading up Beddingham Hill to paint the wide vistas north to the Weald and south to the sea. His boots would pick up that ‘white impression’, light splashed thick as paint or birdlime on leaves, and tread it home afterwards. He also cut these paths into boxwood blocks, their lines swirling across in rhythm with the line of the hills. But it was in his watercolours that they preserved their mystery. They dipped and curved, always bending out of view, towards the horizon that might never be reached and the country that might never be known. When they made for houses – thick-walled, deep-roofed, crouched against the slanting rain that forced the walker into the hedge – they flowed past, bound elsewhere. In one painting, this time of chalk hills in Jefferies’s Wiltshire, two lanes intersected, either route possible, neither certain, nothing marked on signs; a red Post Office van hesitated amid the green and white. In another, of Cuckmere Haven, a white path wound beside the white meanders of the river towards the boundless radiance of the sea. The paths ran beside telephone poles, their deep-worn silence contrasting with the high hum of the wires, and in parallel with barbed-wire fences, smooth beside sharp.
Yet Ravilious did not paint these paths, in the strict sense. He left them as white paper, brushing in the spare grass with thinnest strokes to show the bare scapulae of the hills. For what had to be caught was that underlay of light. Not just the surface play of it, when it moves up a slope as a thumb rubs through velvet or as a teasel cards wool, misting into deep drifts at the field’s edge and wisps across the summit – but the kingdom of brightness just beneath the grass, and hollow as a drum beneath the feet.
Four miles north-west of Eastbourne the apparent ruler of such a kingdom, the Wilmington Giant, lay carved in the chalk, reinforced with white bricks, with a tall staff in either hand. Ravilious loved this figure, depicting it again and again, though mischievously he sometimes called it a giantess, seductively shining under sun or moon on the broad flank of the hill. There were gates of light involved here, opening in the chalk: thrust wide by Baldur, the summer god, to let the day begin, or by some far older Neolithic sun god to announce the high season of growth and harvest. The figure lies on the north slope of Wilmington Hill, underneath the main path, so that it is often in shadow and hard to see; but at its back, or through the gates, lies a southern, sea-bright, scintillating world, continually flashing with new stars.
There was to be a book of such figures. Ravilious, handed this commission, painted half a dozen or so on travels across the chalk Downs of the south, most of them giants or swift-running horses observed from third-class carriages in trains. He worked fast, for with the coming of war in 1939 they were to be blacked out or turfed over, together with all the chalk ways, cuttings and tracks. On a train journey in 1941 he met ‘a tall and rather lordly person’ who owned the land around the Wilmington Giant, and learned that he had already camouflaged the figure with grass. The god was buried again, a premonition of the deadening and darkness to come.
For within white chalk lay movement and power: a quickening gleam, a declaration from beyond, as when swallows burst out of a fragment of cliff that fell to the beach at Brighton, then Brighthelmstone, during a winter storm in the 1760s. Gilbert White, the great naturalist of Selborne, told the story in his Natural History, a work Ravilious eagerly made engravings for.5 Both men agreed, as White wrote, that ‘there is somewhat peculiarly sweet and amusing in the shapely figured aspect of chalk-hills’. ‘There are bustards on the wide downs near Brighthelmstone,’ White continued, a statement Ravilious found ‘beautiful’ and elegantly engraved, with the great bird standing stoutly against the smoothly sweeping scene. Still more marvellous, though, were the Brighton swallows. Many witnessed the wonder of their tumble out of the rock; others, not seeing, wished to believe it, for it might explain why and how these birds disappeared when summer ended. They crept inside the chalk and slept. The man who told White the story, an ‘intelligent person’, took it to be true that apparently inert stone could be inhabited by life. People still talk of cutting into the ‘living’ chalk or limestone in a way they do not talk of granite, sandstone or shale.
Shepherds of the Downs also shared that understanding. Their local name was ‘lookers’ and their trade ‘lookering’, as if they scrutinised everything in their realm that lived and moved in light. As they wandered with their sheep they set up flocks of small birds, pretty white-rumped wheatears, which nested in cliffs and rabbit holes and could be taken from the stones, if horsehair springes were set for them. (On a plou
ghed field of brown-and-white flints the birds are disguised so perfectly that the stones themselves seem to start and fly.) The peeping, fluttering prey were caught, strung on a grass stem and stowed away in a greatcoat pocket, carefully, for they were worth eighteen pence a dozen when sold as dainty mouthfuls for fashionable Brighton supper tables. An old shepherd told Hudson that one couple, laying traps on Beachy Head, snared 1,200 wheatears and, unable to thread them on crow quills as usual, bagged them up in the husband’s smock and the wife’s billowing white petticoats.
The little birds that sprang from the chalk could also prompt higher pursuits. One shepherd boy and champion wheatear-catcher, John Dudeney of Newmarket Hill near Lewes, hid within the white hillside in the 1790s his home-made pasteboard telescope – a Perspective-Glass through which he had seen not the Celestial City, indeed, but still the transit of Mercury – his History of Rome procured at Lewes fair, his Latin primer, his precious store of blank white copybooks and Turner’s Introduction to Geometry. He called this his ‘under-stone library’. All had been bought with money from wheatears and from the lamb and white wool of the single sheep he owned. Had he caught a bustard – for his grandfather had seen one, up on the Downs where four parishes met – he might have gained a whole encyclopedia.
He did not neglect his flock. He would pace to and fro, reading, as the sheep cropped quietly beside him. One winter, when the whole scene glared white, he could not study, for ‘the snow turned into ice on my eyelashes, and [my father] breathed on my face to thaw it off’. When the turf was dry again, laying out his white paper on the barely grassed white stone, he drew out perfect circles and triangles with an old pair of iron compasses which he had filed down to hold a pen. A valley lies beyond the hill, Cold Coombes, bare and unwatered, scattered with sparse thorns; but the chalk slopes beneath it hold chanted declensions, and elevations of the stars.