The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (33 page)

We left London shortly after dawn in David’s white van, trucking west along the A40. Heaps of old black oily snow by the sides of the roads; the sky low and overcast; a hidden sun shedding a weak and eely light. Somewhere near Swindon, we left the van in a snowed-up side lane and took to our skis, following a wide old sunken track over which black hawthorns bent from either side, up towards the summits of the chalk downs where the Ridgeway ran.

On the ridge it was five degrees below zero; even colder in the wind, which shivered the hedges from the east. Three black horses stood statue-still in the middle of a snow-covered field, so flattened by contrast and distance that they resembled paper-cuts. Near them was a white horse, showing grey against the snow. The sounds of gunshots reached us from the west, the noise rippled by the land over which it passed. We settled to the rhythm of the skiing:
glide, hiss, flick, step, slide
.

Low light, saturating the landscape with a dull glow that never thickened to a shine but still drew blues from the long-lying snow. Where the chalk showed, it was the yellow of polar-bear fur or an old man’s knees. I found it all bleakly beautiful: the air battened down, the light at its slant. It felt both absurd and wonderful to be moving on skis over this ancient path.

We saw no one for the first two hours. The cold and the gloom had emptied the landscape of people. We had stepped into another xenotopia: Wiltshire as Antarctica, the crossing of a border brought about by the strangeness of the weather. The air felt charged with the static of imminent snowfall, though the snow never came. Beech plantations stood to either side of the path. On the uphills and plateaux the skis gave an extra two yards for every pace we took, and it seemed at times, moving along those high ridges, as if we were flying, the snow beneath us figuring as white air and strengthening the fantasy.

This is, I now know, a well-documented illusion of England’s downlands – one of the common conjurings that this landscape can make upon the mind – and it comes upon the walker as well as the skier. Virginia Woolf compared striding the crest of the Downs to flying through the air. Thomas found his imagination borne aloft as he watched kestrels hunt high above him. W. H. Hudson wrote in 1900 of how on the Downs’ ridges he felt his mind ‘
become more aerial
, less conscious of gravity’, and that the ‘desire for flight’ came to him ‘most often … on these great green hills’. At times, he wrote, it seemed that he might ‘lift great heron-like wings and fly with little effort to other points of view’.

That day it was apparent to me why this dream of flight is so forceful on chalk downs. The lines of the landscape are both bare and continuous, a wave of dips and rises. There is little to impede the free movement of the eye or the presumed free movement of the body: no ravine or cliff that might detain you, few forests to tangle your sight. The repetition of the down-form suggests infinite distance and unlimited regress. The downland turf also contributes: a cocoa-matting of plant life whose natural springiness exceeds even that of peat, such that your foot bounds up from contact with it. And there are the birds of the Downs, its true gliders and soarers: buzzards, owls, kestrels, skylarks, rooks and swifts, tracking always overhead.

Flight-filled, the chalk hills have long attracted wingless walkers, would-be aeronauts, aerial dreamers and other devotees of the elevated view. Most fascinating to me among these people was Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), the English landscape artist and path-obsessive who loved the chalk-lands of England, especially in snow, and who painted their whorls and tracks in all seasons. When I try to imagine how Edward Thomas saw the Downs, I often think of, or rather I think
in
, the paintings of Ravilious.

Ravilious was a watercolourist, engraver and muralist, one of the best-known English artists of the 1930s, a follower of old paths and tracks, a votary of whiteness and remoteness, and a visionary of the everyday. Strangers called him Eric. Friends called him Ravilious. Close friends called him ‘The Boy’: a Peter-Panish nickname – a charm against ageing, a chrism against death. He was handsome: an angular face, large dark eyes, a sloped nose, dark hair, long fingers always holding brush, pen or cigarette. He liked tennis, billiards, propellers, winter, the shadowlessness of sea light, northerliness, ceramic, boxwood, crystal and ice. Fastidious but also impetuous, he had a habit of putting his head out of train windows and losing his hat to the wind.

He was brought up on England’s downlands, and before he fell fatally in love with the ice and light of the far north, Ravilious worshipped the chalk of the south. His childhood was spent in Eastbourne. Up behind the town billowed the South Downs, and on weekday evenings and at weekends, while his father pored over the Old Testament, developing his own annotations to the texts (an intense and private exegesis that lasted for most of his adult life), Ravilious, left alone, began to explore the surrounding countryside. He made expeditions, slept out (tucked under hedges or with the stars for a ceiling), and walked for hours, following the beckoning lines of the Downs: the eye-leading ridges, the meandering streams, and the chalk paths which curled across that landscape. He read
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
, and dreamt of the adventures to be found down the river roads.

The Downs, with their soft and equalizing sunlight, their pathways and their loneliness, primed Ravilious’s imagination. They informed his whole outlook and way of painting, he wrote, ‘
because the colour
of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious’. Through them, he grew to cherish certain landscape characteristics: crisp flowing lines, an aura of detachment from the lived world. This was the terrain – with its combination of human workedness and extreme age – that shaped his temperament and his sensibility, as it differently shaped Thomas’s. It bequeathed to both men shades of melancholy, and it also induced the dissociation that tinged the art and personality of both. Ravilious came to possess, in the phrase of one friend, ‘
a kind of wariness
against all allegiances and personal involvements’. Another observed that Ravilious ‘
always seemed to be
slightly somewhere else, as if he lived a private life which did not completely coincide with material existence’. This out-of-kilterness also distinguishes his painting. Viewing his work, one has a sense of looking at two overlaid acetate sheets of the same image, imprecisely matched, or of two intersecting paths that never quite achieve their
vertex
.

Part of the sense of disengagement that attends Ravilious’s paintings has to do with the images of tracks, prints and paths that he repeatedly used: footprints on snow or in mud, left by unseen pedestrians, walkerless paths that entice the eye and the imagination out of sight, promising events over the horizon. Ravilious was obsessed by tracks: he read deeply in the work of Thomas and he revered Samuel Palmer, who wandered the footpaths around his Kent village by dawn, dusk, night and day, and he absorbed Alfred Watkins’s
The Old Straight Track
(1927), with its vision of a concealed network of Neolithic trade routes spreading across England and the world. Ravilious’s mentor at the Royal College of Art was Paul Nash – another lover of chalk, another follower of the old ways, another artist of the path.

Ravilious walked the chalk paths of the Downs, and he made art of them. In 1929 he engraved the Wilmington Giant on boxwood, for a zodiacal almanac in which the giant features as Taurus: a large white figure crowned by a full moon. In 1934 he painted his own garden path. In 1935 he painted
Chalk Paths
, in which three tracks compete to lead the eye away, while a barbed-wire fence snags the gaze. A 1936 canvas records travellers’ caravans stopped by the side of an old road. An undated work, titled
Eastleen Road
, gazes down a Sussex green way. Dozens more paintings are of paths: glimpsed behind waterwheels, out of house windows, from trains; paths crossing fields, leading along cliff-edges or up to the other great chalk figures of the Downs (the Uffington Horse, the Cerne Abbas Giant). In 1937 he visited Gilbert White’s Selborne in Hampshire, and walked the holloways of which White had written in his third letter to Thomas Pennant. Ravilious’s engraving of a Selborne holloway shows a deep lane, over which the trees are leaning and locking, and the entry to which is guarded by a barn owl in flight. The owl’s head is turned out towards the viewer, its eyes quizzical behind its knight’s visor of feathers.

The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination, and so did the light: falling as white on green, distinctive for its radiance, possessing the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea. If you have walked on the Downs in high summer or high winter, you’ll know that the light also has a peculiar power to flatten out the view – to render scattered objects equidistant. This is the charismatic mirage of the Downs: phenomena appear arranged upon a single tilted plane, through which the paths burrow. In these respects the light of the Downs is kindred with another flattening light, the light of the polar regions, which falls usually at a slant and is similarly fine-grained.

The light and the path were Ravilious’s signature combinations as an artist. Together they create a unique disharmony. He produced scenes that seem suspended almost to the point of stasis, but that also allude to some future or simultaneous action. The effect on the viewer is one of dissonance: the sensation of occupying a space between two worlds, or even two entirely distinct geometric systems at once.

It felt, that day on the Ridgeway, as if we had stepped into a Ravilious canvas. The sense of suspended animation, of action occurring elsewhere. The light levelling the landscape and the path beckoning us through it. Everywhere, the snow was grooved: by the old chalk tracks, by bicycle tyres and tractor wheels, by the lines of our skis and by the prints of dogs, hares, rabbits, pheasants and people. On the declivities we skied past hollow cow-parsley stems and yellowed grass, and we sank into deep drifts around the base of hawthorns, which seemed to grow like crystal: the jag and cross-jag of thorn and black branch against the snow.

Yellow, white, grey, grey-blue: the landscape had been burnt back by the cold to its ashen colours. Here and there were flashes of fire: haw-berries like blood in the hedgerows, the sparks of redwings in flight. Now and then the low sun showed yellow through clouds. Fieldfares clattered in the bushes, plucking haws, throwing their heads back and swallowing them whole at a gulp.
Sarsen
stones stood about in flocks, with snow on their rounded backs. Buzzards were out in ones and pairs, turning in the sky, looking for the carrion which was more plentiful in such prolonged cold weather. We passed a kestrel hunched on a telegraph post, its head sunk into its shoulders. We passed Bronze Age round barrows and Neolithic long barrows. Two brown hares made an urgent run across a big field, kicking snow from their hind feet. In the canopy of a long thin beech wood, rooks yabbered and called, tossed up into the air and then settled back, as if the wood itself were boiling.

Sometime about mid-afternoon there was a bleak glitter of sun, and shortly afterwards we turned a bend of the Ridgeway and looked across to see, for the first time – in a piece of pure landscape theatre that had not changed for nearly 5,000 years – Silbury Hill rising white in the distance, apparently floating high above the surrounding landscape: another of the flying islands that dot these pages.

For those last short hours of daylight, we moved through a world drained of people and colour. Once, a heron launched itself from low ground to our south, a foldaway construction of struts and canvas, snapping and locking itself into shape just in time to keep airborne, slowing time as it beat away northwards on curved wings.

For most of Ravilious’s life, the Downs satisfied his landscape needs. Especially in winter, when the beech hangers stood out like ink strokes in a watercolour, they embodied his aesthetic ideal: crisp lines, the fall of pale light on pale land. But as the 1930s wore on, he began to desire an elsewhere, an otherworld. Like many Englishmen before and after him, he came to locate that elsewhere in the far north – the dreamed-of land of the Arctic Circle and the midnight sun, of icebergs floating in water black as lacquer, of the aurora borealis, of spines of grey-blue frosted mountains and the year’s last sun shining like foil on the horizon line. Since boyhood, Ravilious had been entranced by the romance of the polar regions. He had read widely in the great books of Arctic exploration and adventure. He collected nineteenth-century editions, maps and images of the far north, including copperplate engravings of the journeys of Barents, Ross and van Heemskerk. The colour white – or if not colour, then tone, or atmosphere, or absence – seems to have possessed a particular power of attraction for him: it was there first in the chalk of the south, and later in the ice of the north.

By the time the Second World War was declared, Ravilious’s
boreal
obsession had deepened. He was restless to travel north, and his chance to do so came with his appointment in late 1939 as an official war artist, which gave him a rank of acting captain in the Royal Marines, and influence over his postings. So it was that, in the last three years of his life, as Peter Davidson has finely written, ‘
the snow and the snow light
on bare hills draw [Ravilious] steadily northwards’.

In May 1940 came the news for which Ravilious had longed. He was to sail with HMS
Highlander
to Norway and across the Arctic Circle.
Highlander
would be supporting the Allied assault on Narvik. ‘
Goodbye Tush
,’ he wrote to his wife, Tirzah, ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can but it is all out of my hands as you can see.’

They sailed for days over good seas, up through the latitudes, the day lengths growing as they ploughed on, escorting the aircraft carrier HMS
Glorious
. Ravilious sat on deck working for hours, or leant on the stern-rail, coatless in the northern sun, watching the wake curdling the sea into cream and green: a white track, a chalk path inviting him to step from the ship’s side and stride out along it, back south, back to Tirzah.