by Ali Smith
So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit wild places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. And if it could happen then it could happen now or any time, because there is a historical precedent, which is not the same as President Obama which is a different spelling though also a precedent of president at the same time! which is quite cool and witty when you think about it THINK YOU’RE THE CLEVEREST
the fact is, actually, it is okay to be clever. It is more than okay, to. It is cleverist, to be. Brooke Bayoude: Cleverist. CLEVERIST. So all these people here today looking at Greenwich, London, and thinking that history is past and over, that all it is is grass mounds in the ground where the Anglo Saxon men were buried once with all the shields and the music of the spears, should look again. Just look! It is called the Observatory here after all! ha ha! There is a picture of a man at the front of the telescope book at home. The man who is from the year 1660 has his whole body covered in eyes that are open. There is an eye on his foot and an eye on his knee. There are some all up his leg and his arm, and one on his shoulder, one on his wrist and one on his hand. The hand with an eye on it is pointing at the sky, where another hand, without an eye on it, is coming out of a kind of cloud of light and words are coming out of the fingers of the upper hand. The upper hand! Joke. The man who is looking at the word-hand has open eyes on his stomach even. The eyes cover him like butterflies would if butterflies ever landed all over you all at once. Imagine if your whole body was covered in butterflies and the butterflies were eyes, opening and closing their wings like eyelids and all seeing at the same time at different heights and angles. Would we see things from all their different sides at once? Would that make what we see have a different dimension inside our brains? In that telescope book there is also a picture of a Greenwich pensioner sailor from the old days hiring out his telescope to people and underneath the picture it says that probably the people are so keen to look through it because he has it pointed at Execution Dock. Because people actually paid money to a pensioner sailor to watch somebody be executed through a telescope! A person on Execution Dock would probably be being hanged, not guillotined, because the guillotine was not used in England although there was a way to execute called the Halifax Gibbet in England in history which was a bit like the guillotine. The point of the guillotine was that it was used so people would have a clean and quick death. It was popular in France, and 16,500 people were historically executed on one in what is now Europe where you go on the Eurostar to, in the 1930s and 1940s, though not since as far back as 1967 when the last person was guillotined somewhere. Brooke can’t remember where. She will have to check her facts. The problem with reading facts on the internet and sometimes in books, is that sometimes you might not be reading the true facts.
The fact probably is, a man was sent to prison in France for slapping the face of the head of a person who had just been beheaded to see if the face was still alive after the head was cut off!
The fact probably is, too, that in Halifax you could be sent to the Halifax Gibbet if you stole thirteen and a half old pence, and Halifax is not very far from York, where there is a house where a lady lived who was pressed to death by big stones. Brooke knows this because she has visited the lady’s historic house where there is a museum.
But the fact is, how do you know anything is true? Duh, obviously, records and so on, but how do you know that the records are true? Things are not just true because the internet says they are. Really the phrase should be, not the fact is, but the fact seems to be.
The fact seems to be, someone tried to blow up this very Observatory right here in 1894! It is a fact, apparently, that he didn’t damage the Observatory but instead he just blew his own stomach out right here in this park! There was a hole where his stomach should be and one of his hands exploded off, when the bomb exploded in that very same hand he was holding it in, well, the moral of the story is, don’t hold bombs in your hand, duh obviously. In fact a two inch piece of bone from inside the hand was found near the Observatory wall after that man died but the Observatory itself was not damaged by it or anything. Brooke puts her hands where her own stomach is and feels for what she can’t see inside herself. The man was apparently still alive when the people found him, and he could still speak apparently. Doctor Doctor, I feel a little empty inside. Doctor Doctor I really need a hand. !!! No, but it will have been really horrible. That man, therefore, could have literally actually in reality basically reached his own hand through the hole in himself and out the other side (meaning the hand he still had, obviously, not the one that got exploded off). So that is what history is, people and places that disappear, or are beheaded, or get damaged or nearly do, and things and places and people that get tortured and burned and so on. But this does not mean that history is not the unseen things as well. As an example of this: from up here you can see some of Greenwich—but not all of it. You can’t see all the people who still don’t know what in fact in reality has happened, still waiting there outside for Mr. Garth to come out or not come out. They are invisible for the simple reason that the place and the people are behind the trees and buildings so you can’t see them from here. It is a matter of perspextive. You can’t see the theatre, or even its roof, where the man called Hugo who was there the first night Mr. Garth shut himself in is doing the monologue. A monologue is a play with just one person in it. The title of the actual play is Miles To Go Before I Sleep, because Miles is Mr. Garth’s first name, although all the people outside call him Milo. It is meant to be about Mr. Garth and what is happening inside the room.
(The man called Hugo was sitting there on the stage when the audience members came in and sat down. He sometimes waved to them and sometimes acted like they weren’t there. When the play began, you couldn’t tell that it had begun, and then suddenly it just had. He did a lot of talking to himself and to the audience about how he had shut himself in the room because he wanted to be an actor and be on TV and the Stage but he had Failed in his life. There was a lot of sitting in the play, and some standing up, and then sitting down again. He sat on the bed and spoke, and then he stood behind a chair and spoke, and then he sat on the chair and spoke, and then he sat down on the floor and spoke. There was a great deal of speaking. He had pretend long hair and a pretend long beard like a wizard. He did not look anything like Mr. Garth. Brooke and her mother and father went on Friday night. It was an Alps of boredom. Brooke fell asleep in the second half. Then Brooke and her mother and father were on their way out of the theatre and they met Mrs. Lee who goes to see it every night and matinee because she has something to do with it. She told them for ages, again, about how realistic it all was and how she went and stood on the stage sometimes before or after the audience was allowed in and imagined she was in the actual real room in her house, and sometimes she could actually believe that she was, that’s how real it was. She told them again how the people doing the play even sent to Amazon.co.uk to get some of the very same DVDs that were in the actual room, with the same pictures on the covers, to make it be true and lifelike. He doesn’t look anything like Mr. Garth looks in the room, Brooke said. Well, none of us knows for sure, do we, Brooke? Mrs. Lee said, and the performance, every night, virtuoso! Mrs. Lee shook her head as if there was something she was looking at that she couldn’t believe. It was kind of you to put the tickets aside for us, Brooke’s mother said, especially
with the run being sold out like it is. Then Mrs. Lee spoke some more about how the play was transferring soon to a real theatre. This is a real theatre, Brooke said. You enjoyed the play, didn’t you? Mrs. Lee said to Brooke. I found it weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Brooke said. Mrs. Lee laughed. A bit over her head, Mrs. Lee said over Brooke’s head to Brooke’s parents. It is so not over my head, Brooke said. We all enjoyed it very much, thank you, Brooke’s mother said. We certainly did, Brooke’s father said. Then the Bayoudes said goodbye to Mrs. Lee and left the theatre. They stood outside and waited to cross the road. Virtuoso, Brooke’s father said. Virtue so-so, Brooke said. Her parents laughed so much that she thought about saying it again but people tend not to laugh so much the second time you make a joke. It wouldn’t be virtuoso of her if she did. It would actually be a bit virtue so-so if she did! Why is the theatre always sad, Brooksie? her dad said taking her hand as they crossed the road. Joke or do you really mean it? Brooke said. Joke, her father said. I give up, why is the theatre always sad? Brooke said. Because the seats are always in tears, her father said. It was a good joke when you knew that it was about the other spelling of the word tears: tiers. Tiers: rows of seats on a slant.)
The fact is, Mrs. Lee’s husband isn’t living at the Lees’ house any more. Josie Lee has to go to Bloomsbury to visit him since that’s where he’s moved to. Hugo who is in the play now lives in the Lees’ house because it is so close to and handy for the theatre. Is that a kind of history too? She will write it in the Moleskine. But history usually only records the Abbots and Kings and the Dukes and so on fighting over who gets to own a park like Greenwich Park and who gets put in jail because someone else wants what they’ve got so just sticks them in the jail and leaves them to rot and goes and takes it. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t record all the histories. On the contrary.
(Take One-Tree Hill, for instance, Anna said when she gave Brooke the Moleskine for her birthday. Look how many trees are really on that hill. Lots more than just one tree. Look at Queen Elizabeth’s Oak. We all know the story, or we can find it out really easily if we don’t know it, about how it was already old and hollow when Queen Elizabeth the First sheltered under it when all of a sudden she was caught in the shower of rain. And we know that it only finally fell over about twenty years ago, when the people who decided they were going to conserve it stripped off all the ivy then found out, when they did that, that it was that ivy that had actually been holding it up in the first place, and then while they tried to fix it into place forever with a piece of metal they knocked the tree completely down by mistake. Ha ha! Brooke said and Mr. Palmer laughed too. They all laughed for ages. It was funny. What if Queen Elizabeth the First had been there and had seen those things happen? Off with their heads, probably! But think of all the other trees in the park too, Anna said. They all have histories.)
The fact is, every tree that ever lived or lives has a history just like that tree has. It is important to know the stories and histories of things, even if all we know is that we don’t know.
The fact is, history is actually all sorts of things nobody knows about.
(One evening about suppertime Brooke was worrying about what would happen if the walls and the roof just fell in, the ceiling just collapsed on top of you. Instead of worrying, she took the book down off the shelf, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad. It was about Greenwich and the man blowing himself up in the park! Then Brooke found this thing: from p63 to p245 in this particular book there were pencil circles round certain words. Ostentatious. Transcendental. Ergo. Maculated. Physiognomy. Propensity. Pensively. Finessing. Brooke went through to the kitchen. Why did you put circles round some of the words and why did you choose these particular words to do it to? she asked her father. Her father was doing something with a packet. What words? he said. Brooke held the book up open at page 63. Her father put the spoon and packet down and flicked through the book. Interesting, he said. He looked inside the front of the book and showed Brooke where someone had written in pencil the price £2.50. Yep, he said, it’s second hand. Second hand! this was funny. First: because of the clocks and watches at the Observatory in the museum which have second hands, and second: in a sort of weird way because of the man with the hand that exploded off his arm. First hand. Second hand. It’ll be whoever owned that book before us, he’ll have done it, her father said. Yes, but it could have been a girl or a woman who owned the book before us, Brooke said. Very true, her father said. Which do you think it was? Brooke asked. I don’t know, her father said, there’s no way of knowing. There must be a way of knowing, Brooke said. She did a little dance leaning on the table. Her father gave her back the book. He began reading the side of the packet, which was something to do with rice. Unprecedented. Intimated. Brooke went back through to the front and sat on the rug and made a list on a piece of paper of all the words with pencil rings round them. Pristine. Unscrupulous. Then she went back through to the kitchen. What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don’t know, Brooksie, he said, I don’t remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you’d decided to buy it. But dad, why do you think a person who first owned this book would have circled these exact words? she said. Her father was holding a saucepan under the tap but not turning the tap on. Hard to say, he said. Augment, Brooke said. She flicked further through the book to find another one. Emulation, she said. They’re easy to say. Her father laughed. No, I didn’t mean it literally, he said, I meant it’s hard to say why he, or she, did it. Ah, Brooke said. Maybe the person was circling the words he or she didn’t understand or know the meaning of, her father said. Yip yep, Brooke said, that is a possibility. She went back through to the front room. She climbed up on to the sofa, balanced on her knees on its high back and reached down the big dictionary. Expedient: suitable or appropriate. Coruscation: glittering, a sudden flash of light. Augment: to increase, make larger. She knew already what lucid meant. Then she looked at the list of words on the page to see if the person who had circled them was maybe making a code out of, say, their first letters, because the book after all was about spies and spying, at least this is what it said in the writing on the back cover that it was about. Tempppf. Or maybe the code was hidden in their last letters. Lodyyyyg. That one looked a bit like the language called Welsh.
But the fact was, in reality, it was a mystery as to what had happened with this book and why. It was something Brooke would simply never know and she simply had to settle for that fact, her mother told her a couple of nights later when she was in bed and thrashing about and pulling up all the covers, and couldn’t sleep at all for the very much wanting to know. It was her third night of not getting to sleep because of it. It was nearly 2am. Count backwards from five hundred, her mother said. Count sheep. But it wasn’t that kind of a not-sleeping night. It was a different kind of not-sleeping from the kind where all the dead people from history line up instead of sheep, looking with sad long faces and queuing for miles and miles at a gate too high for them to jump over, so many there’s no way you could count them. Queuing for Miles! it would have been good if all these people went and queued outside Mr. Garth’s window and not at the end of Brooke’s bed! all the people who died in Haiti when their houses fell on them, just collapsed out of nowhere, and all the people who died in the tsunami, who got swept away, children as well, and the people whose aeroplane crashed into the sea, and the boy who was ten who was executed because he stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry, and the boy who was stabbed to death outside a school just because he was black, and the girl whose body was dug up in a back garden who had been murdered by the man, and all the people killed in the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and Darfur and Sudan, and they were just the ones at the front of all the people who had died when they weren’t meant to in all the other historic wars, and even the children who had died because they were being made to work in factories or clean chimneys in Victorian times or who were executed to death for things like stealing less than fourteen pence. You don’t need to say executed to death, her mother said then, because to death is implied in executed. Her mother was getting impatient. But the Secret Agent awakeness about the words was a much more annoying kind of awakeness. There was no one to say sorry to in the Secret Agent awakeness. The person who somebody should be saying sorry to was Brooke! for making her not be able to know what the answer to why the words were chosen was! Brooke had to decide, her mother was saying now, again, that if she wanted to read that book and not be annoyed by the not-knowing, she would either just have to persuade herself, right now, to put up with the not-knowing, or she would have to make the active decision to rub out the circles that made the words stand out for whatever their unknowable reason was, and then she’d be able to read the book without it annoying her. Brooke put her head under the pillow. It defeats the purpose, she said under there. She wondered if her mother could hear what she’d said from under the pillow. Her mother was saying something. Brooke couldn’t hear properly. She took the pillow off her head again. My special eraser from the office tomorrow, her mother was saying, the really good one, will that do? Thank you, Brooke said. It will have to do. Her mother kissed her goodnight and switched off the light and drew the door over. But inside Brooke’s head what she thought as she closed her eyes knowing she would not sleep, was: it will not do. She opened her eyes and saw the ceiling above her.)
