The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (37 page)

Above me, swifts hunted the dusk air over the scarp slope. They turned so sharply and smoothly and at such speed that it seemed the air must be honeycombed with transparent tubes down which the swifts were sliding, for surely nothing else could account for the compressed control of their turns. Their flight-paths lent contour to the sky and their routes outlined the berms and valleys of wind which formed and re-formed at that height, so that the air appeared to possess a topology of its own, made visible by the birds’ motion.

I was woken again the next morning by exulting skylarks. I knew now from skylark experience that sleep was no longer possible, so before dawn I walked down into Lewes and then onto the southern slopes of Mount Caburn, the only major summit of the Downs that outlies the main chain. Purple heads of marjoram thrummed in the warming breeze. I picked up a scabious head and pinches of wild thyme.

Near Glynde, I crossed the Ouse: the river mucky-banked, beginning to loop as it neared its floodplain and the sea. The path climbed again, up onto Firle Down. Teasels were flowering purply-blue, their seed slots arranged in a dense
helical
pattern upon the seed-head. On one of the teasel-heads a bee was buried face-down in the blue, its legs spread wide in nectar ecstasy, as if floating in water.

Late in the day, tired in the legs, I reached Cradle Hill, into whose eastern slope a great white chalk horse had been cut. Below me the River Cuckmere made its greasy meanders towards the sea. I dropped off the scarp down to the river, and then along the edge of the Cuckmere for two or three miles. The brown river mud was a rich text of bird prints, and my boot marks joined the tracks of heron, cormorant, gull and egret, more densely printed even than the snow I’d walked at night in the winter.

The river water was the colour of milk chocolate. I found and kept an egret wing feather, washing-powder white, and I picked a trail of bryony, its leaves shaped like glossy baroque hearts. Near Exceat a cormorant ducked under the water, its dark shape darting and surging, then popped up with an eel in its beak. The eel flashed and whipped, stiff as a bike chain, gave the cormorant the slip, spun free.

An hour before dusk I stood on the summit of a small chalk bluff, from which I looked down onto Cuckmere Haven, the point at which the river reaches the Channel. It is a wide bay of flint shingle with a shallowly sloping foreshore, formerly guarded by slumping pillboxes. Coastguard cottages perch on the high ground to its west, and to its east the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters are strung out like a line of washed and pegged sheets.

Fledgling little owls made test flights between the branches of sycamores. A pale horse stood motionless in a cropped field, gazing northwards. The tide was high, and for a hundred feet away from the shore the water was the colour of greeny milk. The waves had sluiced chalk from the foreshore and cliffs, and the sea was holding the particles in a glaucous and letterless suspension.

I walked down onto the shore and along the tideline, which was cobbled with flint boulders. Beneath the first of the Sisters, my eye was caught by a clutch of grey flints which lay together like eggs right at the foot of the cliff. I picked them up, one by one, amazed. Each one had a drawing of a creature on it, made in chalk. The style was Lascaux: naïve but fluent in line. A deer, a gull, a hawk, a seal, a human figure. Somebody must have been sitting here that afternoon, using a piece of chalk from the cliffs to draw those figures onto the flints.

I placed the largest of the stones on a flat outcrop of chalk, and then arranged the others above them in decreasing size order. Hawk, on top of seal, on top of deer, on top of human: a simple cairn at the river-mouth, marking my sea-fall and the end of the walk. I looked out over the channel, over the dissolving margin of chalk in the waves. The white ribbon of the path, the snow-white of the flints, the blinding white of the egrets.

The same massive chalk deposit that forms the South Downs dips into the English Channel, and then rises again in northern France around the Pas-de-Calais area. During the First World War, much of the fighting on the Western Front took place on a chalk-and-flint landscape: a geological continuation of the same vast Cretaceous deposit that makes southern England.

When Thomas neared the trenches in February 1917, the similarities he discovered between the terrain around Arras and that of the South Downs spooked him: as if he could have turned from the front and walked straight back to the paths of Hampshire. ‘
I like the country we are in
,’ he wrote to a friend on 26 February of that year. ‘It is open hilly chalk country with great ploughed fields and a few copses on the hilltops. The ruined villages of brick & thatch & soft white stone have been beautiful.’ He carried his dream-map of the South Country with him to the front, and studied it often during the ten weeks or so that he survived out there.

‘
Now all roads
lead to France,’ he had written in ‘Roads’, a year before going to war:

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead

Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the roads bring

To me or take from me,

They keep me company

With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude

Of the loops over the downs,

Hushing the roar of towns

And their brief multitude.

What did take Thomas to France? No means of knowing now unless we improvise, and journey back along his inner roads, into what he once called the ‘
ghostland
’ of his past.

15

Ghost

Easter Sunday, 8 April 1917, the eve of the Battle of Arras. Thomas sits on an ammunition crate in his dugout, reading back through his diary. Reeking sack walls. Brown lamplight from a twin wick in a Swan glass chimney. A lid of skim-ice on the water in his mug.

Voices drift in. The men are singing ‘Mr John Blunt’:
And there came travellers, travellers three / Travelling through the night-oh …

The diary is a Walker’s back-loop pocketbook, bound in brown pigskin. There is an entry for the ‘
bright warm Easter day
’ just ending: a 5.9" shell had fallen two yards from Thomas as he stood in the forward-command post, but hadn’t exploded; the blast from another had scratched his neck. On the final pages he has jotted notes for unwritten poems: ‘The light of the new moon and every star’; ‘The morning chill and clear hurts my skin while it delights my mind’ ‘I never understood quite what was meant by God.‘
the light of the new moon
’

Outside, the men are singing again: ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.

5.30 a.m. is zero hour. The offensive will begin with a creeping artillery barrage – the ‘hurricane bombardment’, as it’s being called – which will prepare the way for the infantry assault on the German lines. Thomas and his battery will supply part of the barrage. For days his gunners have been practising with the new graze fuses, designed to vaporize barbed wire. The timing and aiming of the creep has to be precise: synchronized between batteries, and with the trajectories of each gun carefully calibrated according to its rate of barrel degradation when firing fast and hard, as they all will be tomorrow.

Thomas has a long easy gait, rhythmic and swinging. A negligent lope, leisurely but rapid. He has blue eyes (or perhaps they are grey), tawny hair (or perhaps it is sandy, or perhaps just fair) and a fawnishness to his looks. He smells of tweed, peat and tobacco. He has large pockets tailored into his jackets, to carry maps, books and apples. He walks with a stick; hazel, sometimes ash, but holly best of all. He dislikes wearing a wristwatch. He walks usually with one-inch maps, which he consults by tucking his stick under his arm, spreading the map over his large hands, then refolding it and striding on, ‘
aware of some completely invisible track
’. He tends to walk silently, even in company. His friend Eleanor Farjeon, who for years quietly loves him, says that after following a path with Thomas ‘
you would not walk
[it] again as you did before. You would know it in a new way.’

From a young age, he is a compulsive walker, a wandering creature. He’s born in Lambeth, south London. His early experiences of walking are suburban: Wandsworth Common, Wimbledon Common. From a young age, too, he is a noticer. He keeps a journal of natural events. He remarks the date of the opening of the year’s first violets, he plots the location of birds’ nests, he records encounters (a heron taking an eel; a sparrowhawk’s berserk pursuit of a starling) and phenomena (clouds that hang like pudding bags in the sky, heat mirages). He’s a collector, too, mostly of flowers and eggs. He shins up trees to reach nests, always leaving one egg to encourage another clutch.

He develops an inclusive botanical vision that appreciates weeds as well as wild flowers. He prizes ragwort for the way its flowers show hard as brass. The overlooked and the unnoticed attract him: the ‘
flowers of rose-bay
on ruinous hearths and walls’ or ‘the long narrowing wedge of irises that runs alongside and between the rails of the South-Eastern and Chatham Railway’, almost into the heart of London.

He is introduced to Helen when they’re both only seventeen. Helen knows almost immediately that her ‘
only peace would be to be needed by him
’, and so it proves to be. Their courtship is conducted mostly through walking. They walk fields and lanes and footpaths together: out at Merton, Richmond Park, Wandsworth Common. She can’t at first tell a beech from a birch. She’s short-sighted and finds it hard to pick out birds; he teaches her calls and songs so she can know without seeing. They press and label flowers: tormentil, bryony, harebell, bedstraw, milkwort. Thomas gallivants around, showing off his knowledge and ease in country lore. From a copse in Merton he retrieves a compact and mossy chaffinch nest, firm as a ball in the hand. At the Richmond Park heronry he scrambles up a Scots pine to bring down a blue-green heron’s egg; a squashed sky-globe.

Helen feels lifted into a new world, doubly intimate with Thomas and with nature. ‘
[I]t seems strange now
,’ she recalls years later, ‘that there was ever a time when I could not recognize the beech’s fine-textured skinlike bark, and the set of the trunk and branches like human limbs, and the beautiful curve that the leafy branches make, like a hand opened for giving. ’ It says much of Helen that she is able to perceive generosity in the form of a branch’s curve.

When they first make love on the day of her twentieth birthday, it’s inside a leafy glade in a hazel and beech thicket on Wimbledon Common. Thomas weaves her a braid of white bryony and that evening gives her a ring, a fine gold signet ring set with a red stone that had belonged to his great-grandfather, a Spanish sea captain.

They marry in secret, while Thomas is still an undergraduate at Oxford. They move around: lodgings in London, then the lease on a farmhouse in Kent. Their relationship is founded on her absolute love for him. But unconditional love is arduous to give, and even more arduous to receive. It can prompt – as it does in Thomas, over the years that follow – a cruelty on the part of the recipient. Such love, in its willingness to forgive all, in its eagerness to cherish faults as virtues, can come to seem like a declaration of insufficiency on the part of the recipient. You cannot match my love; your love will
always
fall short of mine. Added to this is the realization that the lover who loves you so much
cannot be hurt by you
; that their love is imperishable. Therefore you can try, almost guiltlessly, to hurt them. It becomes a challenge. As Thomas’s melancholy tightens on him over the years, as the weasel-bite of his depression locks and deepens, he will hurt Helen increasingly. Her vulnerability, combined with the invulnerability of her love, conspire to encourage his emotional mistreatment of her.