To the River (26 page)

It was just after noon and the tide was on the turn. The surface of the river glittered slightly and on the far bank a train rushed up the valley. Stock Cottages were opposite and I figured I was pretty much exactly in line with where the old Stock Ferry used to run. According to the map a dead channel still passed by the ferryman’s cottage, a vestigial blue line as functionless as an appendix. The ferry itself had apparently run twice daily, taking the farm workers to harvest and back. It was thought to have been drawn by ropes and had once sprung a leak and drowned one Oliver Symons, shepherd, and his flock of fifty-eight sheep.

The path that runs from here into the Downs is said to be prodigiously old. It felt that way today, in the silent, unpeopled landscape. An occasional fish surfaced and the sun dropped like a blow, the ground beneath it beaten very gold, the dust rising in sheaves from where it had been struck. I felt like I was saying goodbye. I wouldn’t be this alone again, for once I came back from the hill I’d be rushed through Piddinghoe and into the sprawl of Newhaven. I plumped down on a bed of ground ivy and uncapped the water bottle. The river was like glass beneath me, a hawthorn wavering within it. Up above the martins were turning their cat’s cradles through the sky. I could hear the road, but it was an undercurrent to the larger silence of the place. Maybe, I thought philosophically, it was something to do with the turning tide, which opened a natural pause in the day. I drew a deep breath and as I did a grasshopper leapt down my top, bounced out and whacked me smartly on the forehead.

The track to Piddinghoe led past Deans Farm before breaking uphill across the dry chalk bed of a winterbourne. I climbed past tussocky banks of wild thyme stitched with yellow crosswort and the pale flowers of heath bedstraw. Selfheal and birdsfoot trefoil, which as children we called bacon and eggs, were also growing in profusion, and between them the bees moved in their drunken drifts. The cropped turf was scattered with lumps of chalk and great knotty flints in the shape of roots or teeth. I kicked one to watch it tumble and dislodged by accident a rabbit’s foot on a shard of bone like a lolly on a stick. The abundance of herbs was making me delirious. I counted as I climbed: plantain, agrimony, silverweed, cinquefoil, the evil-looking bittersweet, which is also known as woody nightshade and bears inverted heads of mauvish petals with thrusting yellow stamens. The sky above the slope was colonised by larks, rising in all directions, their voices as unbroken as the perpetual choirs of monks that are said to have worked in shifts of one hundred an hour to ensure God’s glories never for a moment went unpraised.

What I couldn’t see were wheatears, those plump little white-bottomed birds once so plentiful in these parts that their trapping became a kind of micro-industry. In 1743, Jeremiah Milles, a young antiquarian who would later become dean of Exeter Cathedral, went on a walking tour through Sussex and, as was then fashionable, produced an account of his journey. He was largely interested in castles and churches, but the hunting of wheatears had evidently intrigued him greatly, for he left for posterity an exceptionally detailed record of their capture.

I ascended the downs on which I saw cast numbers of traps for wheatears. These birds are about the size of a lark with brown feathers, which have a streak of white in their wings and tails. They are a bird of passage, for they come in the month of June, and go away in September, during which time they are most prodigiously fat and are a most delicious morsel; they are supposed to be the same with the Becaficcos of Italy and Turkey. Their name of wheatears I take to be a corruption from white arse, the rumps of the birds being remarkably white and fat. There are but few parts of England where these birds come, for they frequent only the downs, and are supposed to live upon flies, because they never find anything in their stomachs, though I imagine they eat rapeseed, because I saw many of them flying about it. They are a solitary bird, appearing always single, and are foolish enough to be easily ensnared. The manner of taking them is thus. They cut up two oblong turfs out of the ground in the following shape [and here Milles drew an upturned L]; across one part of this cavity they fasten a small stick with two horse hair springs to it and then cover some part of the cavity with one of the turfs in this manner [and here Milles drew a horizontal line across the upturned L] but so the light may appear at each end. These birds hop about from turf to turf, and when the least cloud eclipses the other end, they make towards it and are caught in the springs. These traps are laid in rows all over the downs, at the distance of two or three yards from each other. The owner of them goes round twice a day to examine and take out what birds are caught. One man has oftentimes a hundred dozen of these traps, by which all the neighbouring country is supplied with birds. They are sold here picked and trussed for about one shilling a dozen.

At first I found this story hard to credit but a book called
Highways and Byways in Sussex
confirms it, adding that the wheatears were not killed by the traps but remained within them, caught by the neck and unable to wriggle free, until the trapper – who was usually a shepherd – returned or someone who wanted what had become known as Sussex ortolan for supper took it and left a penny in its stead. During the eighteenth century the birds were hunted in such vast numbers that in midsummer the Downs appeared to have been ploughed on account of the abundance of upturned turfs, which were restored when what was left of the flock returned to Africa each autumn. By 1904, when
Highways and Byways
was published, the practice had fallen into abeyance, but the author, Edward Verrall Lucas, who was, it might be added, the biographer of Charles Lamb and a prodigious collector of pornography besides, is at pains to explain that larks and goldfinches were still hunted in their thousands on the Downs. To this end he describes a bizarre contraption called a
lark glass
, which had apparently once been popular in France and which I can’t help but suspect he might have made up.

The lark glass was apparently made from a triangular length of wood about three feet long and a few inches deep and set with little shards of mirror, which was attached to an iron spindle and rapidly spun by means of a piece of string tugged by a trapper, who sat perhaps twenty yards from the device. The reflection from these revolving mirrors possessed ‘a mysterious attraction for the larks, for they descend in great numbers from a considerable height in the air, hover over the spot, and suffer themselves to be shot at repeatedly without attempting to leave the field or to continue their course’.

This spectacle would without a doubt have intrigued Leonard Woolf, who once exploded a rocket in a field so as to watch a vast flock of starlings burst into the air, blacking out the sun. Perhaps I’d come back with a disco ball and see if revolving mirrors had retained their allure. As it was they were all about me: descending larks that dropped as if lowered on a string, wings horizontal, before plunging the last storey of air in one headlong forty-five-degree dive, rolling out all the while their unstoppered phrases of exultation.
Not gone yet
, they might have been saying, or
can’t catch me
, for we are more careful with our wild birds now, banning the trapping of all but the most allegedly virulent of pests: the corvids, lesser black-backed gulls, Canadian geese, parakeets and feral pigeons, which may be shot or caught in nets or those cages known as Larsen traps, though these must be provided with food, a perch and water at all times, as well as being checked at least once daily, particularly if a decoy bird is being kept inside. The Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 is explicit on this last matter, adding that all birds must be killed in a quick and humane manner and that ‘Canada geese held captive prior to being killed must be killed out of sight of other captive birds of the same species’, a nicety that is not extended to the sociable crow or rook.

As I climbed on up the slope, I remembered a poem by Raymond Carver about a decoy bird, a wing-tipped goose that’s kept imprisoned in a barrel by a farmer with ruined skin whose fields are filled with blighted barley. It’s fed all the wheat it can eat and in return it acts as an unwitting lure for other geese, which flock so closely round that the farmer can almost touch their feathers before he guns them down. The narrator of the poem, who has wandered onto the farm while shooting with a friend, looks down into the stinking barrel and never forgets what he sees. The goose stays with him all his life; an emblem, if a living creature can ever be so reduced, of betrayal and loss and need.

There’s something about this poem that makes me think the goose was real, though not everything Carver described in his tight drawl was true. It was written in the 1980s, a few years before he died, so even if it was it must also be dead by now. Perhaps it’s been replaced. Or perhaps the farmer went bankrupt or died himself, in a shooting accident or from the same disease that ring-barked his hands. Either way, it sounds an echo with another bird, this one caught on the page by Hemingway: the crippled green-headed drake trapped at the end of
Across the River and into the Trees
. This mallard is brought by the dog Bobby to the duck-hunters’ boat, ‘intact and sound and beautiful to hold, and with his heart beating and his captured, hopeless eyes’. The Colonel places him in a burlap bag in the bows, to be kept as a caller or released in the spring, and though it’s the Colonel who dies at the close of the book it’s this imprisoned, helpless bird that remains in the reader’s mind as the lasting symbol of any living creature’s vulnerability in this world.

In the brief lives of birds man finds a parallel for his own condition, and nowhere has this been achieved with more force than by the monk Bede, who spent his days in a monastery in Northumberland praying and writing and calculating the true date of Easter, and who once compared the existence of man to that of a sparrow. The scene occurs during an account of the pagan King Edwin’s conversion to Christianity in
A History of the English Church and People
and it must stand as one of the most beautiful speeches in the language, though I might add that I like its purpose not a bit.

The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter with your ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all. If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to be followed in our kingdom.

Passing from winter to winter again
. Aye, that seems about the size of it. We’re set down here with no more clue than a sparrow or a lark, arising out of darkness into light and with the knowledge that we may wink out at any time. One thousand two hundred and seventy-four years have passed since Bede died in his Northumbrian monastery, and still we are no nearer to knowing what is to follow or what went before we appeared, each one of us, on this spinning earth.

Bede used this fearful state of affairs to counsel faith in God. Throughout his life, Leonard Woolf preached the opposite creed, and it’s not perhaps surprising that he has also employed animals to do so, for he loved them deeply and was rarely without at least a cat or a dog. His own philosophy –
nothing matters
– embraced the darkness that followed life, and he thought belief in the false machinery of heaven an act of cowardice. In
Growing
, he describes a menagerie he kept in Ceylon, and the memory of this fine collection of beasts, which included a pack of dogs, a baby leopard and a deer with a pronounced taste for tobacco, sparks one of his fiercest disavowals of the existence of an afterlife:

I do not think that from the human point of view there is any sense in the universe if you face it with the gloves and the tinted spectacles off, but it is obvious that messiahs, prophets, Buddhas, Gods and Sons of Gods, philosophers, by confining their attention to man, have invented the most elaborate cosmological fantasies which have satisfied or deceived millions of people about the meaning of their universe and their own position in it. But the moment you try to fit into these fantasies my cat, my dog, my leopard, my marmoset, with their strange minds, fears, affections – their souls if there is such a thing as a soul – you see that they make nonsense of all philosophies and religions.

As for Bede and his
elaborate cosmological fantasies
, elsewhere in his
History
he takes up the story of a Northumbrian man from Cunningham, who fell sick and while lying near death in his bed was transported – or so he claimed – to the furnaces of hell and thence to the fields of heaven. After receiving this vision the man recovered, much to the amazement of his relations, and became a monk, though until then he had been married. In the remaining years allotted him he liked to retell this tale for its pedagogical value, describing to his audiences the torments and delights that awaited them after death. His hell I couldn’t remember, but his heaven stayed with me, perhaps because it seemed so intensely familiar. It had the appearance, he related, of ‘a very broad and pleasant meadow, so filled with the scent of spring flowers that its wonderful fragrance quickly dispelled all the stench of the gloomy furnace that had overcome me. Such was the light flooding all this place that it seemed greater than the brightness of daylight or of the sun’s rays at noon.’

I’d gained a hell of a height in the last few minutes, ascending to a hedge full of wild clematis, flowering blackberry and the last few racemes of elderflower, the petals crisp and brown where they’d once been daubed with curds of pollen. In amongst the larger plants were tendrils of long-stalked cranes-bill, its leaves a bloody pink, and greater stitchwort, which fell among the darker foliage in a shower of white stars. It was very warm, and I threw my pack down and walked unencumbered to where the ground fell away. There was the Weald, blue-shadowed, and from it came the river, though all I could see of it were two snatches of false blue, the colour borrowed from the sky, which is itself composed of nothing more than gas and scattered light.