The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (36 page)

It was only once I’d got home that I researched the folklore of Chanctonbury Ring. I now know it to be one of the most haunted places of the Downs. Sussex folklore, mostly from the late nineteeth and early twentieth centuries, is rife with examples of it as a portal to the otherworld. Arthur Beckett in his 1909
The Spirit of the Downs
had reported that ‘
if on a moonless night
you walk seven times round Chanctonbury Ring without stopping, the Devil will come out of the wood and hand you a basin of soup’, in payment for your soul, which sounds like a poor exchange. More energetic variants of the summoning story stipulated that practitioners should circumambulate the Ring seventeen times on a full-moon night while naked, or run backwards seven times around the Ring at midnight on Midsummer Eve. The ghosts that had been summoned in this manner, apart from the Devil, included a Druid, a lady on a white horse, a white-bearded treasure seeker, a girl child, and Julius Caesar and his army. It clearly got crowded up there on busy nights.

I also discovered that many people who had tried to sleep out at Chanctonbury had been forced to abandon the hilltop due to an invisible presence or presences. In the 1930s, Dr Philip Gosse of Steyning declared in his book
Go to the Country
that ‘even on bright summer days there is an uncanny sense of some unseen presence which seems to follow you about. If you enter the dark wood you are conscious of something behind you. When you stop, it stops; when you go on it follows.’ Most worryingly close to my own experience was a testimony from 1966, when a group of bikers had spent the night at the Ring. Things were quiet until after midnight, when a crackling sound started, followed by the wailing voice of a woman that appeared to move around the circumference of the Ring. The motorcyclists fled, and subsequently complained of physical ailments, headaches and lassitude in the limbs. Reading that, I felt first a shock of recognition and then mild pride that I’d tolerated what had put a gang of hairy bikers to flight.

I woke to a kingfisher dawn: orange cumulus in the east and blue streaks in the cirrus cover overhead. I felt headachey and bone-sore, and walked around the Ring looking for any explanation of the night’s screams. None. A white chalk path spooled away east-south-east over high downs, so I followed it along Bramber Bank, a sloping shoulder of turf which dips gracefully into the upper valley of the River Adur. For half a mile of the bank, the path was littered with thousands of striped snail shells,
Helix nemoralis
, over which I crunched. In one field, ragwort seethed with cinnabar-moth caterpillars. Another field was pink with bursts of mallow, thrust up from the turf like magician’s sprays of false flowers. Tractor tracks swooped and arced between them. The sun was already hot by the time I reached the medieval church of Botolphs, where my friend Rod Mengham – a Downsman by birth and upbringing, and a poet, archaeologist and writer by practice – was waiting in the shade of the tower to walk a few miles with me. I was very happy to see him.

East of the River Adur, the Downs run in three long plateaux, separated by stream and river valleys. On the high point of the first, Edburton Hill, are the earthworks of a motte-and-bailey castle, which in spring and early summer are a knee-high wild-flower meadow. Rod and I stopped there and lounged among the flowers, in a dry westerly wind, talking about Thomas, Ravilious and why I should never have slept in Chanctonbury Ring. A buzzard searched for thermals above the scarp slope, moving over the ground in a swift flapping flight, until suddenly it found an updraft, and one wingtip was buffeted and the bird adjusted and tacked in response, and then its whole body changed posture, its tail and its primaries spreading and its wings bracing, until it was able to ride the heat in an upwards helter-skelter, its wings curved to catch the rising air.

I recognized only a few of the dozens of plant species that made up the meadow in which we were sitting, though Rod could identify more of them: agrimony, wild mignonette, red clover, yellow rattle, marjoram, scabious, knapweed, lady’s bedstraw, ash saplings, hawthorn shoots and the odd tall bolt of fireweed. Through them all wandered the string-like stem of bindweed. I’d been trying to learn more of the common English wild flowers using a nineteenth-century handbook called
Flowers of the Field
by the Reverend C. A. Johns, a hugely popular Victorian field guide which Thomas had owned and used. Johns helped Thomas become a fine amateur botanist and a self-taught specialist in the ‘fairy flora’ of the chalk. Thomas’s children had in turn learned the chalk plants so well that when Eleanor Farjeon first visited the family at their home in Steep, the children picked a hundred different species and set her a naming test (with seventy as the pass mark and eighty for honours).

Johns’s
Flowers of the Field
pre-dated the concept of user-friendliness. This, for instance, was the Reverend’s severe entry for agrimony, a common plant of the chalk, renowned for its healing properties:

AGRIMONIA
(Agrimony) – Herbs with stipulate, pinnate, serrate
leaves
and terminal bracteate spike-like racemes of small yellow flowers; sepals 5, imbricate, persistent … carpels 2, 1-ovuled, within the spinous calyx-tube; fruit of 1 or 2 achenes.

I was pressed to think of a description less likely to help me identify agrimony when I saw it. But there was something bracingly Victorian in its presumption of expertise: like reading a washing-machine manual addressed only to professional electricians. There was also a lyrical precision to Johns’ accounts. The leaf ‘
in vernation
’, he observed, might be:

conduplicate
, or folded down the midrib like the two halves of a sheet of notepaper, as in the Cherry;
plaited
, like a fan, as in the Beech;
convolute
, or rolled up like a scroll, as in the Plum;
involute
, with the margins rolled upwards, as in the Water Lily;
revolute
, with them rolled backward, as in the Dock;
valvate
, when they touch one another without overlapping; or
imbricate
, where they overlap like roof-tiles.

Lying there in the meadow, idle and drowsy from the sun, the walk and the druggist’s scent of the flowers, with the flies weaving a gauzy mesh of sound above me, I thought that if I fell asleep the bindweed tendrils might lace and sidle around my limbs and I would wake like Gulliver in Lilliput, bound for ever to the ground.

Deep at the source of Thomas’s melancholy was his double longing for travel and rest, for movement and for settlement. As a young man he had drunk deep of Borrow and felt ‘
a roving spirit everywhere
’. He was gripped by a Yeatsian romance of the way, of the path, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s phrase, as a ‘
white ribbon of possible travel
’. ‘…
never
/ Yet of the road I weary,’ Thomas wrote in ‘Roads’, ‘Though long and steep and dreary / As it winds on
for
ever.’ This was the aspect of him that took the swift as his totem bird, for their long migrations and their shrill races.

But Thomas also wished to live long and faithfully in a single place. At times – when lying under the whitebeams or when planting herbs and creepers – he experienced the desire to ‘
take root forever
’. The tree (immovable) and the bird (migrant) are among the two most distinctive presences in his writing; the forest (stable) and the path (mobile) its two most distinctive landscape features; and the root (delving downwards) and the step (moving onwards) its two contrasting metaphors for our relations with the world.

Thomas sensed early that one of modernity’s most distinctive tensions would be between mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other – with the former becoming ubiquitous and the latter becoming lost (if ever it had been possible) and reconfigured as nostalgia. He experienced that tension between roaming and homing even as it was first forming. It is a tension I know something of myself. ‘It is hard to make anything like a truce between these two incompatible desires,’ Thomas wrote in 1909, ‘the one for going on and on over the earth, the other that would settle for ever in one place, as in a grave and have nothing to do with change.’ ‘For … years,’ noted Helen after he had died, ‘Hampshire was his home county.’ But then the need to move surged in him again and ‘he left Hampshire to enter the army, and never knew a home again’.

Before the bindweed could set to work I rose up, and Rod and I continued our journey, stumping eastwards on tired legs, crossing B-roads, car parks and the
dry valley
of Devil’s Dyke, a steep-sided
combe
carved out of the permafrosted chalk during recent ice ages. By afternoon, high on the longest of the Downs ridges – the Plumpton Plain – I looked longingly up at the buzzards, wishing for wings myself so that I could loft over miles in minutes.

At Kingston, Rod and I parted company. I turned up Jugg’s Road, the broad old footpath from Brighton to Lewes that leads onto the summit plateau of Kingston Down, and the path along which fish caught and landed on the coast would be carried over the Downs to the market towns on their north side. I dawdled over the plateau, looking for a place to sleep. I passed dew ponds and tumuli, and a big field mushroom lying upside-down on its cap, its black
gills
like the charred pages of a book. Eventually, I decided on an area of lush turf, between two gorse bushes that would serve as windbreaks. The turf was rich with bedstraw; a good plant to have as my mattress.

Hundreds of feet above me, skylarks trilled on, the notes of their songs falling like chaff. W. H. Hudson described how on a bright evening in the summer of 1899 he had gone up onto the Kingston Ridge to find the thistles of the Downs shedding their seeds to the wind like a blizzard of ‘
faintly-seen silvery stars
’. It was an extraordinary sight. ‘I gave myself up to the pleasure of it,’ Hudson wrote simply afterwards, ‘wishing for no better thing.’ He recalled a similar phenomenon on the South American pampas, when he had gone out riding at night and galloped through head-high drifts of thistledown, his horse shying at this ‘insubstantial silver mist’ which ‘gleamed with a strange whiteness in the dark’. I remembered how, during the Second World War, the summits of the South Downs became strewn with thin strips of metal known as ‘
dupel
’, which were dropped by German planes in order to confuse British radar. Thistledown, dupel, songnotes like chaff, slivers of silver, tones, words and scenes starting to shift and smudge …

Thomas is often described as a poet of place, but the volatility of place fascinated him more than its reliability. He was compelled by the present-tenseness of nature – the chink of a blackbird in a hedge, the cool of starlight, the feel of a feather’s vanes between the fingers – but he was also alert to landscape’s instabilities, to the unbidden adhesions of memory that can bind one place to another, to the insubstantial silver mists of association through which we move and within which we see, and to the sudden slides and tricks that the mind can perform upon us even when we think we might be at our truest in the world. Place, in Thomas, frequently operates as the sum total of the locations that have been left behind or have yet to be reached.

This is why reading Thomas’s writing is such a dissonant experience. His poems are not harmonious dreams, and while he was acutely sensitive to the consolations of landscape, he also recognized the fractures and queer junctures that can attend our transits. F. R. Leavis rightly described him as working at ‘the
edge of consciousness
’: his work is concerned often with suggesting that which is ungraspable or placed beyond reach. ‘
Many a road
and track,’ he wrote in a very late poem called ‘Lights Out’:

That, since the dawn’s first crack,

Up to the forest brink,

Deceived the travellers

Suddenly now blurs,

And in they sink.

Blur and sink, blink and slur, for Thomas the past felt fissile, its recovery only partially possible at best. Memory and landscape were both in flux. There is dust on the phonograph needle: voices, if heard at all, reach us through a burr of distortion, or are snatched briefly from the static as we twist the tuning wheel.

In his book
Footsteps
(1985), Richard Holmes compared the biographer’s act to ‘
a kind of pursuit
, a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s path through the past’. What Holmes realized in the course of his own pursuits was that the footstepping biographer never actually reached his subject; only encountered at best the second-order suggestions of their earlier presence: glimpses of afterglow, retinal ghosts, psychic gossamer. ‘
You would never
catch them,’ cautioned Holmes, ‘no, you would never quite catch them …’ I had set out to come to know Thomas by walking where he had walked, but he had mostly eluded me, remaining a Lob-like figure glimpsed now and then at a bend on the path or through a hole in the hedge, still enigmatic. And yet I had learnt so much from the people I’d met along my journeys: people for whom, as for Thomas, landscape was intricately involved with self-perception, and for whom certain places or weathers brought yields of grace. Ian sailing his sea roads, Miguel wandering his forest paths, Steve Dilworth striding from boulder to boulder, Anne Campbell and Finlay out on the moors, Nan Shepherd walking up and into the mountain, Raja roaming the Israel–Palestine anticline, keeping the paths open. This, I thought, had been the real discovery: not a ghostly retrieval of Thomas, but an understanding of how for him, as for so many other people,
the mind was a landscape
of a kind and walking a means of crossing it.