by Graham Swift
Happiness quells thought. And work quells thought. And Matthew did not lack for work. I see him, as his neighbours saw him, riding off over the hill to a world that was changing even more rapidly than his father-in-law’s misgivings could encompass.
Who has heard of the copper rush of southwest Devon (you see, Potter, I have done my homework), which came and went over a century ago? Forget your Klondikes and your Californias. Who has heard of Josiah Hitchens of Tavistock, “King of Copper,” who in 1844, the same year that Matthew Pearce encountered an ichthyosaur and also happened upon Elizabeth Hunt, discovered in a wood in the Tamar valley a copper lode so rich that it would form the basis for almost two decades of the biggest copper mine in Europe and within two years return its shareholders eight hundred per cent. The “mine”—that is, a chain, a family of mines (Hitchens must have regarded them as his children), which multiplied themselves along the course of the lode: Wheal Maria, Wheal Fanny, Wheal Anna-Maria, Wheal Josiah (naturally), Wheal Emma … Collectively known as Devon Great Consols.
Then there were all the lesser, hopeful ventures spawned by Hitchens’ discovery—including the Wheal Talbot mine, in which a certain James Neale would have a dominant interest. Then all the attendant enterprises (all work for Matthew): quays on the lower Tamar (ore out; coal in), canals, pumping systems, even the Consols’ own railway.
Under the guidance of his moribund senior partner, Matthew would have acquired the sought-after skills of a mining surveyor and watched the sinking of shaft after shaft. Beneath the day-to-day bustle of it all, the uncanny irony must surely have struck him. That he should be plunged, so literally, so nakedly, into the realms of Geology. That he should be lowered—for sometimes it must have been required of him—into those subterranean zones from which no one returns without having their view of life on the surface modified. When he rode back over the hill to Burlford and took in the timeless cluster of rooftops and church tower, the rookeried beeches behind the Rectory, how did it seem? Like a welcome refuge? (After all, he and Elizabeth might have chosen to live in Tavistock itself.) Or, more and more, like some piece of brittle, nostalgic scenery?
24th June 1856:
I perceive the Rector apprehends the literal undermining of his parochial security. Tavistock marches outwards—underground! Says: “My dear Matthew, I fear there will soon be nothing left of our familiar surroundings but a precarious crust. When you ride into Tavistock, do you not expect at every moment your swift descent into the lower world?” Answer, to the point: “I assure you, sir, we surface dwellers are in no such danger.” Do not say: “But the picture we cherish of our familiar world may be a thin crust for all that.”
And then there was the railway. By 1849 it had reached Plymouth, with further track laid in Cornwall. A little matter, in between, of spanning the Tamar estuary at Saltash: it would take ten years. Matthew worked on the Ivybridge-to-Plymouth section and on the projected Tavistock branch line, and, as early as 1848, would have been involved in the preliminary surveys and geological soundings for Brunel’s great Saltash bridge. It was during this time that Matthew himself was first introduced to Brunel (these little glimpses of the great—you can see why Potter is keen) and came under the spell of the engineer’s mixture of practical genius and formidable energy.
18th August 1854:
… I have grasped the meaning of I.K.B.’s perpetual cigars: he must have them, as furnaces must have chimneys—they are lit from within.
(So Brunel was a smoker too.)
And it was during this time which marked the high tide of Victorian endeavour and the high tide of Matthew and Elizabeth’s marriage that the couple, like true devotees of the new age, travelled to London (by express train, naturally) to see the Great Exhibition.
11th September 1855:
I remember—but four years ago—how we journeyed up to see the Exhibition. I do not think there could have been two happier people. It was her first journey of any length by train, and she was full of the astonishment of the thing—how it could not be possible that the cattle and the hedgerows and barns and millponds passed by so quickly and smoothly, as if they moved, not us; and how London, which she had never seen, was surely too far a place to be reached so rapidly. And I was full of how it was all, indeed, quite possible, giving a reprise—she acknowledged it—of my observations on that day we first met, and expounding the further mysteries of gradients and viaducts and cuttings and tunnels, until she threw up her hands and said, “Stop it, stop it, please! I would rather admire than know!” Whereupon I said, continuing to tease, “I grant you the joys of ignorant wonder, but, to quote your father—that is, to quote one of his quotations: ‘Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas’ ” (giving a fair imitation of the Rector’s best scholastical style). Whereupon we laughed like children out of school, apologising, in his absence, to the good man.
Then she said suddenly, “Why—that is it! We should call him Felix!”—for she was then newly with child for the third time. “Is not that a happy name?!” “So it is another boy?” I said. “Of course,” she said. “And how can you tell?” “I simply can. Was I wrong with John and Christopher? You see, my dear Matty, in this case I know and you must admire.”
And a boy it was. And I will never forget how her eyes sparkled, how we laughed, with the countryside rushing past us. And those words still ring in my ear: “I would rather admire than know.”
The green valley, the church, the ivied Rectory, the huddled cottages, the copse, loud with rooks, behind the churchyard. An image out of a picture book of ye olde England, but it still exists. I should go there, perhaps (in my condition?). A sort of pilgrimage. A legitimate piece of field research. I can imagine it. There will be chicken wire in the church porch to stop birds nesting—there always is. And there will be a little, charred, utilitarian enclave in one corner of the graveyard, with a heap of grass cuttings and discarded flowers and an ancient, rusted incinerator. There always is. And they will still be there. Or some of them. Not Matthew, of course. Nor the elder brothers. Nor Lucy. But the Rector, and Mrs Rector. And Elizabeth. Real people, real bones (not this cast of characters). And, with a headstone older than them all (the graves of infants are always affecting), Felix.
22nd April 1854:
Today, after falling ill of scarlet fever on Sunday night, our darling Felix died, beyond the doctor’s saving, at half-past six in the morning, aged one year and ten months.
I don’t understand him. I never sought him out, I could do without him. But there he is, washed up before me: I have to revive him.
I don’t understand him. The Notebooks don’t begin until 1854, with the death of his son. And they end in 1860, with the departure of Matthew from Burlford and from his wife and children for ever. And throughout that six-year period Matthew must have lived, to the world at least, the life he had always lived; must have ridden off every day over the hill to his work, and slipped into bed beside Elizabeth and sat with her in their pew on Sundays, as if nothing had changed.
The Notebooks must have been secret, even from the Rector, to whom his “thoughts” were not. The entries are sporadic—whole months go by with not a word written. And at any time during those six years (but how many times did he do this?) Matthew might have looked around him at all that he had and said, indeed, What is the difference? What difference does it make? And even on that very last day—it was a fine June day: he even found time to note the fleecy clouds and the roses in the Rectory garden—he might have walked up on to Jacob’s Hill, looked down at his house, at the village, at all that sweet, unaltering make-belief, and, with a simple turning of a switch inside him and a sealing of his lips, returned to embrace it.
22nd April 1855:
Is there not in our minds, no less than in physical nature, a power of regeneration and renewal? Are we not lopped and smitten only so we will grow again? I thought it so once. “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
9th August 1856:
&n
bsp; Such a lovely day, blessed day. Unbroken sunshine and the breeze not bringing in clouds but seeming to sweep and cleanse the air. In the evening, at the imprecations of Lucy, who seemed to decide that today she must be my constant consort, took the gig and made a brief excursion with her round and about the village. Such a sweet evening, such a rare light over the valley, and the tops of the trees in Rectory Copse stirring as if with a consciousness of delight. On such a day why should we resist what we credulously call the “evidence of our senses”? “And the firmament sheweth his handywork”! Coming back, Lucy fell at once fast asleep, even in the jolting gig. Had to be lifted, still sleeping, from it. Observed how in her sleep she passes the back of her hand deliberately across her eyes, just as her mother does. Thought how a future husband will treasure that gesture just as I treasure it in Liz. No thing, perhaps, is truly separate from another. What right have I to make hostages to my conscience my children, my wife and all that is dear to me? When I know, truly, I would lay down my life, on the instant, for my daughter and her brothers and their mother, why can I not do the lesser thing and make a sacrifice of my doubts?
24th October 1856:
Raise again with the good Rector the question of Extinction. N.B., not Death—Extinction. The Rector would have it that I confuse—because he himself, perhaps, confuses—the two, and that my discoursing on the latter is merely the old cavilling at the former. I am not so foolish as to take issue with mortality. I will bow to Divine Will—however volatile that Volition—in the individual (have I not done so?). But in the species?
These fossils of mine, quips he, are fast becoming the “insuperable bone of our contention.” But I will not be jested into submission. Question: Is the Creator to be viewed as a mere Experimenter? Why should the Maker who fashioned Noah, and gave him such provident instructions, make what he unmakes? He answers: Being the Creator, he would have every right. I answer: Yes, but what reason? He answers: Did not God repent of his Creation? Was not the Flood sent to punish all flesh with destruction, saving only the seedstock in the Ark? And might not these creatures (viz. “my fossils”) be the remains of those living things destroyed in the Flood, their shapes “monstrously altered” by that great Catastrophe? Answer: Anatomy not so flexible, nor distortion so uniform. And, in any case, “these creatures” were extinct (by any reckoning) before the Flood.
But he does not care to be launched again on the question of Time. He looks at me, indeed, with the scowl of a man who begins to feel I take up too much of his. Yet he once, not long ago, gave it freely enough. He was once not a little glad that, after some ten years his son-in-law, I opened up my thoughts to him and put him, in his words, “on his theological mettle.” We should not, he says, from the small vantage of our private grievances, call to task the universe and its governance. No, no, perhaps. But we regularly, it seems, do the opposite thing and suppose, from our private contentments and the smooth running of our local affairs, the compliant disposition of all things. Example: I am a surveyor; I go out with my yardstick to measure the field. I am told by Lyell here, whose Principles of Geology rests at my elbow and whom I do the credit of re-reading, this time with my eyes open, that the universe is a thing beyond all known calculation. No matter: in order to measure the field it is not necessary to measure the universe, and I will swear, for all Lyell can tell me, that the field I tread today, after diligently perusing his work, is the same field I trod yesterday and that three feet still make one yard.
25th October 1856:
If Lyell is right, and I cannot—without shutting my eyes—pronounce him wrong, then the Book of Genesis is not a history but an allegory—and an imperfect one—and my father’s frail chronometers are of little avail in estimating the immense periods of Geological Time. Suppose that aeons elapsed before the Creator made Man, before the world became such as we see it to be, and that the six days of Genesis are properly to be counted in millions of years; then the entire record of human history is as a wink in the world’s duration. And if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose that futurity holds for us any guaranteed estate and that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?
29th October 1856:
Walked with the Rector before dinner over Jacob’s Hill. Fine autumn weather, the bracken turning. Ventured—with caution—to raise again above questions. Answers: Bah! Who but the Almighty could have raised mountains and levelled plains? I answer: Lyell could tell him. Offer to lend copy.
Question rather is: Why should the Almighty have been so slow? If He ordained for us a privileged position between the brutes and the angels, why did He place us there so late? Anticipate the Rector’s answer: God not to be reckoned by temporal gauges; all is one sub specie aeternitatis; “a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday,” etc., etc.
6th November 1856:
Dined in Tavistock with Neale, who will be chief venturer in Wheal Talbot, and Mr Benson, a visiting acquaintance of his, a Manchester man and something in cotton. Neale a sound enough fellow. Mean to invite him some day to Burlford. Benson harder to fathom. Proposes: (1) to acquire of Neale, and similarly of others, the exclusive right to refine the arsenopyrite waste from Wheal Talbot, which can hardly be objected to by Neale, who would otherwise have the task of its disposal; (2) to export said arsenic to the American plantations to curb the American boll weevil, thus benefiting—“a pretty chain of consequences”—not only the planters but the economies of Devonshire and Lancashire.
Asks (Neale having told him, doubtless, of my “bug-hunting”) whether I am acquainted with the boll weevil—“a prodigious devourer of cotton.” Answer: “No, I am not familiar with that species, but is there not a blight upon the cotton trade more detrimental than the boll weevil? I mean the blight of slavery.” Answers: “Indeed, sir, there is much sentiment aired nowadays on the subject of slavery, much of it, I observe, by those who do not object to wear cotton on their backs or who fondly suppose that slavery is an evil unmet with in our own happy land. You do not know our Lancashire factory hands. You would find them also an interesting species. I assure you that were you to view the conditions under which the mass of them exist, you would consider the miners here in Devon to be blessed in comparison. It would be an interesting experiment, would it not, to remove one of your negroes from his shackles in the Carolinas and set him down, a free man, in the din of one of our Manchester mills? Would he thank us, I wonder, for our Christian mercy?”
9th November 1856:
Estimation: from one mature oak tree, in a seed-bearing year, some 20,000, or, say, two bushels, of acorns. (This from calculations upon my own observation of the oaks in Loxley Wood.) Of which but some hundreds will root as seedlings (failure in germination; eaten by birds and animals). Of which again barely some ten per cent (nibbling by animals; want of light—your bracken is your enemy of your oakwood) will remain after the first three years.
Estimation: A hen salmon of ten pounds from our Tamar will deposit, say, 10,000 eggs, of which perhaps only a quarter are made fertile and of these the vast bulk will be destroyed as eggs, in the larval stage or as parr. For this (being itself one of the lucky survivors) it performs, unstintingly, its gruelling and eventually fatal yearly journeys from the sea.
Estimation: The pheasant (this from Wilson, the gamekeeper) will lay, say, twelve eggs in a year. Of which (assuming no vigilant and protective Wilson) some three or four will be lost as eggs to weasels and other nest-robbers—not counting the frequent destruction of whole clutches—and of the surviving nestlings some three or four again will fall to predators or, as young birds, to the trial of their first winter.
The same pattern, if the margin of waste narrows, among the higher animals. If we suppose the human species to be above the harsh husbandry of nature, then we need but look to our own systems of economy (N.B., Benson’s factory hands). Two minutes in the company of our copper miners will prove that they are Toms, Dicks and Harrys; but are they not perceived as so many man-
units, quantifiable (and expendable) at cheap rate?
Conclusions. (a) Bad: That nature is a pitiless arithmetician and gross cozener, hiding behind her bountiful appearance the truth that the greater portion of Creation exists only as a tribute to Destruction.
(b) Good (but conditionally): That nature is indomitable in her promulgation of life. What expense will she not spare to maintain her own? But this the tenacity of the blind. If disposed by the Almighty and All-seeing, why not with more thrift?
10th November 1856:
“And herb for the service of man”? If the cotton plant were created so we might not lack for clothing, why the boll weevil? And all the nations of pests.
15th November 1856:
The Rector has returned my Lyell. Confesses he has progressed so far but found it bewildering ground. It is the ground under our feet! Concedes he will not judge what he cannot pretend to have studied. A humble way of wishing the subject closed. But I perceive a kind of challenge in this embargo on further parley. I have spoken; he has heard me. This is the gist of it. He has allowed me, for so long, to be the advocatus diaboli in his study; he has answered me with patience, with sympathy, even with pleasure in the envigoration of the exercise—but now, if I truly mean to persist in all this, would I consider very carefully the consequences?