The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (34 page)

Hard sea battles were fought. Ravilious’s ship was attacked by plane, mines and submarine. But Ravilious barely referred to these dangers in his letters home. The attacks were offstage events. More important to him was that the sun never fell below the horizon. At 70° 30' 00", he painted the midnight sun, poker-orange above a boreal sea so blue it almost expired into black.

The art Ravilious produced during these weeks was perhaps his finest, certainly his strangest. His images are full of action but devoid of people. They possess a lonely watchfulness: Ravilious the sentinel. The silvered bleakness of the Arctic seems to have entered them, infusing them with a stillness. They are at frost point.

His letters, too, assumed a more
oneiric
tone than usual. The atmosphere was ‘
remote and lovely
’. When the ship entered fog banks, it was as though they had passed into some ‘
unearthly existence
’. Terns scooted past, dolphins sculled beside the ship, and once they saw an empty upturned lifeboat. He watched German planes drift over, shiny as sixpences in the high zinc sky, and felt briefly as though he had been transformed into a tube of glass, cylindrical and brittle: the effect something to do with being viewed from above …

When Ravilious returned from 7,500 miles and four weeks at sea, having witnessed deaths and marvels, he found himself changed. The world seemed more spacious to him, and less consequential. The north was still exerting its pull. Within weeks of getting home he was longing to leave again: to Iceland, then Greenland, then Arctic Russia – Novaya Zemlya, perhaps.

But the War Artists’ Advisory Committee asked him to paint the concealment of the White Horse at Uffington, which was being turfed in – millennia after it had been turfed out – to prevent German bombers using it as a landmark or target. They also wanted him to paint the fire engines that had been deputed to spray the chalk roads with black ink, also to prevent them being used as navigation aids by the Luftwaffe.

But then he was posted to Iceland. The timing was far from kind. Tirzah had been hospitalized for an emergency mastectomy, and had returned only a week before Ravilious was due to depart. He should have stayed to care for his family, but he didn’t. He bought Tirzah a copy of his second favourite book, Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
, and cut it in two with a serrated knife, giving half to Tirzah and packing half himself to take away: proof that they would be reunited. He spoke to a friend about the Iceland trip as fulfilling a long-held desire to explore the outer limits of the physical world.

He flew into Iceland on a calm day in late August 1942. The volcanic mountains, viewed from above, looked to him like lunar craters, casting shadows that were dark and striped as leaves. In a Reykjavik market, Ravilious held and almost bought a narwhal horn. He collected flowers and shells to take back home as tokens of the north. From the capital he made a spine-jolting road journey to Kaldadarnes, an Anglo-American airbase on the east coast of the island: breeze-block barracks, a green corrugated-metal roof and a swell of low mountains behind.

He had only been there a night and a day when a report came in of a missing aircraft out of Kaldadarnes, one of the 269 Squadron Coastal Command: a Hudson Mark III that had disappeared off the coast while engaging a U-boat.

At dawn the next morning Ravilious was shaken awake. A search was about to be launched: three more Hudsons were to fly out and sweep the area in which the first plane had disappeared, 300 miles to seaward. Did Ravilious want to fly as observer, paint the mission, possibly the rescue?

Even as the three Hudsons took off, a storm was brewing. They made their search, found nothing and turned for home, their wings bucking in the turbulence. Radio contact became sporadic between the planes, then non-existent.

Only two of the Hudsons landed again at Kaldadarnes. Ravilious’s plane, FH 363, did not. Pilot, navigator, wireless operator, gunner, and an artist who had dreamt as a young boy on the Downs of flying over the northern ice, did not. All five men were lost in a plane looking for a lost plane.

Late in the day, David and I entered a deep winter wood of birch, hazel and beech on the crest of a hilltop. Icicles hung from the branches, and the last light condensed in the
blebs
. Water in a pool in the wood shone black and thick as lithography ink. We crossed an Anglo-Saxon earthwork, a double dyke that ran east–west. Then we emerged from that high ground and looked down onto
the paired summits of Walker’s Hill and Knapp Hill
, the two rounded chalk hills that form a gateway through which the Ridgeway passes.

And there on the slopes of Knapp Hill, suddenly and gladdeningly, were people again: scores of tobogganers in gaily coloured coats and scarves. Even from a mile away we could see their reds and blues, bright against the snow, and we could hear the cries of the children and the crunch of the toboggans over old snow. We skied down to the low ground between the hills hushing through the snow, which lay so lightly that it plumed off the tips of our skis. When we reached the gateway, we climbed Walker’s Hill to the long barrow on its summit, whose contours were encased in crisp layers of ice. Twilight: the sky streaked purple and crimson. The tobogganers on the opposite hill yelled and slid and laughed. A boy in a duffel coat ran down the slope with his arms outstretched.
Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.

That unforgettable day held a final surprise. Dark had fallen, and we were driving back in the van. We were only a few miles from the Ridgeway when David pulled out of a side lane onto a fast road. As he did so a large black-pelted animal sloped across the wide snowy verge to our south, moving with the high-shouldered prowl of a big feline, before flowing into the darkness of the hedge. We glimpsed it only for a few seconds. It was far too big for a domestic cat, and had the wrong gait and size for a fox or deer. As David drove off up the road I swung round in my seat to see two great yellow eyes glaring like lamps from the hawthorn and the shadows. ‘That was a panther,’ I said to David. ‘I know, I saw it too,’ he said, as he drove on. All the way home we speculated about that dark shape. Later, we would find that there had been many sightings of big black cats in the Marlborough Downs. I wished that we had pulled over and gone back with torches to examine the ground, searching for pug marks in the snow and mud. And then I thought that perhaps it was better – after crossing that otherworldly landscape on that ancient path – to have not proof or disproof, but instead a certain image of uncertain origin: the fierce light of those two eyes scorching out of the darkness.

14

Flint

Downs storms — The consolations of landscape — Egotism dispersed — Maps of longing & of loss — ‘The hill road wet with rain’ — Double-penned footfalls — Padders, tramps & hobos — Night on Chanctonbury Ring — Haunting & fear — The Devil’s soup & the hairy bikers — The severe Reverend C. A. Johns — Conduplicate, convolute & involute — Tree & bird; root & step — Night on Kingston Down — Dupel & thistledown — Another white horse — The volatility of place — Futile pursuits — Sea-fall at Cuckmere — Glaucous waves — Finding the flints — Inner roads & ghostland.

The long white roads
… are a temptation. What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past.

Edward Thomas (1909)

Footprints in the wet white earth of the path. The ridge of the South Downs I was walking had become a frontier in the landscape, dividing the world into realms of weather, light and colour. Underfoot, the track – of fine chalk, pure enough to write with, pocked by butterscotch flints – was glossy with recent rain. Ahead of me, it ran brightly off over the hills, dipping from sight before looping back up again, softening with distance.

I was walking in a stormlight that made the linseed pulse a hot green, and turned the barely ripened barley fields to red and gold sand. Dark shoals of rooks over the woods, and billows of rain like candle-blacking dropped into water. The Downs are the only high ground in an otherwise flat and low landscape, and this means that, as in the desert or on an ocean, you can sometimes see what weather will reach you hours before it arrives.

For much of that morning I led a charmed life: monsoon-squalls sliding by to east and west. Then, just after noon, a big storm caught me. Yellow sun-flare, dulling to sepia. Rain drilling the earth. The path a river, gathering the water into a torrent that rinsed the chalk white again. A brisk summer hailstorm. Then rain again, so hard and fast that it appeared as cylinders rather than drops, as if I were seeing through reeded glass, and at last sun again and the air repristinated. I sheltered in a copse of ash, oak and high-trunked beeches, and ruefully considered Hippolyte Taine’s pastoral claim that ‘
the first music of England
’ is to be heard in ‘the fine patter of rain on the oak trees’. That morning, there was nothing musical to the rain. It was military: weather war.

It was the first of many soakings for the day. During each shower the world bleared and wove. After each shower the sun struck back out and the earth steamed and the smells of the land rose up. Sun-blazed rain-scarps trailed off to the south-east, away over the Channel to make landfall on the French coast. I tried to time my miles between storms, moving from cover to cover. Rain-filled hoof-marks and footprints flashed gold, coined by the sun. I felt lifted, glad to be out and walking. Ahead of me lay more days on foot, and the path insinuating eastwards – in the old and innocent sense of the verb, from the Latin
insinuare
, meaning ‘to bend in subtle windings, to curve’.

I’d left early that day from Winchester, planning to follow the ridge line of the South Downs east for a hundred miles or so until it made sea-fall near Eastbourne, where the chalk dipped down underneath the English Channel. I had walked early-day miles past watercress farms and through hangers beneath whose beeches roiled a flak of loose leaves.

My tracking of Edward Thomas had begun on the Icknield Way, and I was ending it back on the chalk again. The Downs were at the centre of his ‘South Country’, and they were his heartland: the area he lived in and walked on for longer than any other. In December 1906 Thomas – with his wife Helen and their two children, soon to be followed by a third – moved to Hampshire from Kent. Thomas came to know his new country by walking and path-following; he would cover thousands of miles on the Downs in the decade he lived there. They became his landscape of closest acquaintance, consoling him in ways that religion or music consoled others. ‘
On the ancient tracks
above which the kestrel has always circled,’ recalled Helen, ‘retreading forgotten footpaths and hidden lanes … he could throw off his melancholy brooding and be content’ (echoes of Albert Camus’s half-contemptuous, half-envious remark to his journal that he might write the story of ‘
a contemporary
cured of his heartbreak solely by long contemplation of a landscape’). The paths offered Thomas cover from himself: proof of a participation in communal history and the suggestion of continuity, but also the dispersal of egotism:

Roads go on

While we forget, and are

Forgotten like a star

That shoots and is gone.

Thomas loved the historical synchronicities of the chalk: the ancient path-lines that were echoed in form by yesterday’s plough furrows. He liked the evidence of human mark-making and tampering over millennia – tumuli, long barrows, chalk-pits, dew ponds – testifying to a landscape that was commemorative, tending to the consecrated. He wrote down lists of Hampshire and Sussex place names, enjoying the ‘
wealth of poetry
’ they possessed. He talked at length with the people he met along the paths of the Downs. And he walked: following lanes to lonely farmhouses or abandoned barns; walking flint-diggers’ cartways, smugglers’ tracks and hares’ paths, generating an elegant typology for the aspects of paths: the ‘
airy motion
’ and ‘bird-like curves’ of those tracks that descend from the ridge-tops down to clay, sand and river; the boustrophedon motion of a path that ‘doubles round the head of a coombe’; the long straight line of the Downs paths in which ‘
a curve is latent
’; the ‘
sheaf of half-a-dozen footpaths
worn side-by-side’ that ran through fields before narrowing and braiding as a bridge or gate was approached; the ‘
grassy track[s] of great breadth
’ that ran under ash trees and ‘amidst purple dogwood and crimson-hearted traveller’s joy’. Late every summer he would look out for a ‘
gentleman of the road
’ who he came to think of as the ‘umbrella man’, who had been tramping for forty years, and who towed behind him as he walked a perambulator that contained an ebony-handled umbrella and, the first August that Thomas met him, a cabbage. The umbrella man was often to be found camping in the deeper and wilder lanes of Hampshire: under a spreading oak or dark spruce, or in a bay of turf.