by Ian Sansom
‘And you do?’
He did not reply.
He and Miriam stood at the entrance to the mine, an opening carved out of the rock and steadied with stout timbers and iron. Alex lit his lanterns.
‘We could share?’ he said, offering a lantern to me.
‘Sefton will be fine,’ said Miriam.
‘Now, Miriam, it is very dark in here,’ said Alex melodramatically. ‘Are you prepared to face total darkness?’
‘I am,’ said Miriam, her voice rather husky with fear.
‘Come on then, let’s get on with it,’ I said.
And we walked into the narrow passage.
‘Watch your footing,’ said Alex; to my surprise the ground sloped upwards as we entered. ‘We have to go up before we go down. For the purposes of drainage.’
For a moment there was light behind us, and then we slipped into the still, cool slurry dark of the caves at Beer.
An account of the caves can be found in The County Guides: Devon, wherein you can read all about the history of the quarries, which were first worked by the Romans, and which have supplied stone to the great cathedrals throughout England and beyond. You can read all about how the stone was quarried by hand, in vast blocks weighing four tons or more, and how it was then carted on horse-drawn wagons or by barges from Beer beach to its destination, sometimes involving journeys of hundreds or thousands of miles. You may read how the freshly quarried Beer stone is ideally suited to fine-detail carving, saturated as it is with water and with very few fossils, and how it has always been much prized by stonemasons. You may read how the stone is found in a thick twenty-foot seam running north to south below other chalk layers, and how on exposure to the air it dries a rich, thick, creamy white and becomes almost indestructible, enduring for centuries. You may read about the difference between chalk and limestone, and the history of rock formations in the British Isles.
You can read all this and still you would have no idea about the caves at Beer.
As far as my memory serves, they are like this.
I remember first the puddles of water – splashing through them, my shoes becoming soaked. And I remember the low passages – banging my head against solid rock.
‘Mind,’ said Alex. ‘The passages are rather low, but the chambers are only a hundred yards. I’m not taking you too fast, am I? Would you like me to go slower?’
‘No!’ said Miriam. ‘Not slower! Come on, Sefton, keep up.’
I remember shuffling forward, bent and wet-footed, with Alex and Miriam up ahead, the sound of them talking quietly between themselves, accompanied by the sharp sound of rocks crunching underfoot, so that the entire rhythm of our short journey was of murmurs, splashes and crunch.
‘Father would love this!’ said Miriam. ‘He’s a very enthusiastic mycologist, you know.’ She sounded nervous, I thought, as though speaking for reassurance.
The darkness deepened and all of the usual indicators of space and time seemed to disappear: there was nothing to orient us. When Alex spoke his voice came echoing as if from nowhere: it was difficult to identify the exact source of the sound. Without a human face or body to identify it, his voice seemed rimless and all-encompassing, like the voice of the place itself, speaking somehow from beyond life.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘The caves at Beer.’ He held his lamp up high, illuminating his face, which – to my astonishment – seemed to glow, with a phosphorescent-like glow, orangey and yellow. It was most extraordinary: absurd and unbelievable, like a pantomime ghost, and yet also undoubtedly impressive and inexplicable. All the anger I had felt towards him seemed to have disappeared. There was no doubt that here, he was in charge, he was to be obeyed. Something brushed past my ear and I let out a gasp.
‘Bats,’ said Alex.
‘Bats?’ cried Miriam.
‘The caves are populated by greater and lesser horseshoe bats. They use the caves to hibernate. We shan’t be too troubled by them.’ His voice was full of reassurance. ‘Follow me,’ he said, and we followed him as he revealed a secret world to us.
It was almost as if we had stepped out of the darkness into a pale sunlit morning. The underground chamber we were standing in was glowing with light: immense, serene and profound. I put out my hand to touch the rough walls.
‘Well?’ said Alex.
‘It’s amazing!’ said Miriam, and for once I had to agree with her. It was the most extraordinary sight, as if the world had somehow been reversed.
‘Extraordinary is it not,’ said Alex, ‘that something so dark should yield such light?’
‘Extraordinary,’ said Miriam, entranced. In the lamplight her face seemed to be surrounded by a halo, her dark eyes glaring out at me.
‘Like a darkroom, Sefton, is it not?’ said Alex. He was right.
In the years that followed, in all my work with Morley on the County Guides, I spent many hours in darkrooms, sitting on a stool by the developing tanks, endlessly repeating the slow mechanical gestures that produced the miraculous development of an image. It took years for me to master all the equipment and the techniques of photography. Many of my early efforts were poor by any standards – the images ill-conceived and ill-staged, the execution poor. Sometimes I accidentally exposed entire rolls of film: most of Essex, for example, I recall, was wiped out in its entirety and I had to return to take more photographs. Half of Cumberland and most of Westmorland similarly went missing. I amassed more and more equipment: tripods, a light meter, various filters and shutter-release cables. And I bought more and more beautiful cameras. An AGFA 6x9. A Voigtlander. A Rolleiflex. But the most pleasurable part of the whole process remained the simplest and yet the strangest and most profound: the transformation of the negative from dark to light, and from light to dark. The taking of great photographs, I realised after many years, involved somehow capturing the very deepest parts of something, those depths where people and places are their very opposites, or their other selves, and eventually I came to understand that this paradox applied not only to my subjects but also to myself. When I pressed the shutter I was indeed capturing something, but that something was not them, out there: it was me, in here. The darkroom was the laboratory of my soul.
‘Yes,’ I said involuntarily to Alex. ‘It is like a darkroom. Thank you.’
‘No need to thank me,’ said Alex. ‘This place is a place of truth. It is a place of revelation. It is in places like this where we as humans truly begin and end. We live in a flicker of light, but the darkness was here yesterday and today, and will be for ever. The dark places of the earth are from where all good issues.’
This little speech, for all its rather strange and stagey qualities, seemed to me at that moment to be utterly truthful and profound. Words that I would have found ridiculous to have been uttered up above seemed somehow perfectly acceptable here. In a place where all the usual assumptions were reversed, perhaps anything was acceptable. Alex was simply making the darkness fathomable.
‘Now,’ he continued. ‘I must show you some of the other chambers. They say that there are chambers here that have not been visited since the time of the Romans.’
‘Perhaps we will discover one ourselves!’ said Miriam. ‘Something that no one has ever discovered before!’
‘Perhaps we shall,’ said Alex, ‘perhaps we shall.’
And so we pressed further and further on into the caves, through narrow low passages, discovering new aspects of darkness. There were rooms of light and rooms of darkness, but the chamber where everything happened I remember most clearly because of its smell: the caves throughout smelled curiously dry and clean, but this place had a stale, rank smell, mixed with something richer and darker, almost like sweat.
‘There,’ said Alex, raising his lantern. It was a small cave entirely filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands of small, stinking, suffocating mushrooms, their pale flesh a horrible admonishment to the dark.
This time it was Miriam’s turn to gasp. It was like witnessing a forest of tiny graspin
g fingers and thumbs.
‘For centuries the locals have used the caves for the cultivation of mushrooms—’ began Alex.
‘They look like …’ interrupted Miriam, who was, for once, lost for words.
What they looked like were the dead, imploring, desperate and pleading.
It was like a scene out of one of my nightmares from Spain. We had come across a church, a beautiful small white chapel, and it was a cold, dark, wintry night, and we were seeking shelter, and the doors of the chapel were swinging open, and so we went inside and inside were women and children who appeared to have been starved to death. And then there were the men – their men? – piled up beside them, shot in the head, shot in the back. And one woman lay, emaciated, with a baby still suckling at her breast and her mouth was wide open, and her eyes squinting, as if she were looking up in joy or in amazement, perhaps at the expectant return of her husband, or at God, or justice, or at planes high up in the blue dark sky above, dropping bombs. And they lay there in the dust and the dirt, their fantastic poor whitedark skin shining in the night, and we lay down beside them, gathered together for warmth, and we drank and drank and swore vengeance. And we wreaked vengeance. An eye for an eye. And even now sometimes in my dreams I see the church and sometimes I even see Franco himself, parading across the vast dark mortuary plain of Cadiz towards us, screaming out his achievements, and us cowering in fear and destroying one another.
I was overcome with this terrible memory then, lost in the chambers and passages of time, sunk in the stench, and I have no idea how much time passed – it could have been a minute, it could have been an hour – before I realised that I’d lost Alex and I had lost Miriam and when I called out there came back only the echo of my own voice.
For a moment I stood perfectly still, my breathing shallow, and then I panicked and started to run, through the blank space, and through the darkness, yelling out. Spiders’ webs swept across my face, chastening my every move, and water splashed up around my ankles, and the faster I ran the closer I seemed to come towards the very darkest and furthest and earliest places of the world, and the very darkest and furthest and earliest places of my being. The air became warmer and thicker, my breathing slower and more sluggish until eventually it felt almost impossible to walk, and impossible to move. The darkness became all-powerful. Vast chaotic empty landscapes of nothing seemed to stretch out into the recesses of the gloom and it was impossible to tell whether I was standing in some vast chamber or on a narrow path above some yet deeper and darker depths. It was as though I had been utterly abandoned, on a river or on the ocean, cut off from all civilisation and all hope of rescue, and drifting away fast from everything I had ever known towards oblivion. As I stumbled through the caves and passages there were moments when my past loomed up inside me, in the shape of dreams and horrible flashes of memory – my parents and grandparents, floating towards me in the dusk, there to greet me and to warn me – and it was as if someone had removed the shutters on life and I was able to see inside myself and the world and its meaning for the first time. I felt as though the inner truth of things had been revealed. And the inner truth was darkness.
When I eventually emerged from the caves, panting and frantic, and made it back down the path towards the car, I found that it had gone. Miriam and Alex had left me behind. I looked at my watch. I had been lost for no more than fifteen minutes. But I felt utterly abandoned. I sat down by the side of the road, alone, and wept.
CHAPTER 11
SCIENTIA POTENTIA EST
RESCUE CAME IN AN UNLIKELY FORM, as rescue often does. In one of his books of homiletic sayings, Morley’s Words to the Wise (1930) Morley includes a little phrase, one of his favourites, that he always claimed was from the Yiddish – though frankly his sources were often unreliable, and anyway I suspected him of making up at least half of what he claimed to know. Anyway, the phrase is this: ‘The unexpected should always be anticipated, but never relied upon.’ Whatever its provenance it is certainly not an unuseful saying, particularly for those who might find themselves out on a limb, lost, abandoned, or otherwise at one of life’s crossroads.
Having recovered my composure I began walking along the road back to Rousdon. After only a short distance an old woman riding a pony and trap drew up alongside me. She asked where I was going and I told her that I was headed for All Souls. ‘Climb aboard!’ she said – and her words were not issued as an invitation. They were an instruction.
She was the sort of elderly country woman – almost entirely disappeared now from England – who issues only instructions and reprimands. She belonged indeed to that irrefutable and irrefusable class of person whom Morley sometimes referred to as ‘the Great Great-Aunts of England’, the sort of Englishwoman – we met them on our travels again and again, more numerous than the proverbial English rose, and twice as prickly – whose opinions were forthright, whose energies formidable, and whose prejudices terrifyingly fierce. Her clothes were likewise: she wore a pair of creamy yellow plus fours, an old brown pair of men’s boots, a long crimson velvet coat rubbed shiny with use, and a large round fluffy tam o’ shanter, set at a rakish angle upon her head, that promised at any moment to fly off and begin to self-seed. She was also of such a profound yet uncertain size, in both breadth and height, that she visibly wobbled as she issued her edicts: the entire effect was of a vast, fearsome blancmange.
‘Do you like cats?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said, hoping that this might be the answer she was looking for.
‘Good.’
This was my part of the conversation concluded. In the remaining half-hour that we spent wobbling together in the pony and trap I discovered much about Devon (‘Not the county it was!’), the people of Devon (‘Not the people they were!’) and much else besides (horses: ‘Not what they were!’; bishops: ‘Not what they were!’; and butter, cider, cream and Honiton lace, all of them not what they were). At one point in the conversation, as we bounced up and down in the trap, she was denouncing one or other aspect of Devon society with such force that as she threw back her head her false teeth flew out, all in one piece. Somehow she caught them in her right hand, whipped the horse to go faster, and continued talking as though nothing had happened. This was revolting yet also undoubtedly impressive, demonstrating a mental and physical agility quite remarkable for a woman of her age and size: she was most definitely what she were.
She eventually slowed as we approached the school gates.
‘You can drop me here,’ I offered.
‘I will do no such thing, young man,’ she said. ‘I shall drop you at the school, as I said I would.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘It’s really very kind of you.’
‘Kindness is not what it was,’ she lamented.
‘No,’ I agreed.
As we turned in past the school gates she drove the pony harder with her whip until we were actually racing along the driveway, which was now flanked by cars stretching all the way down to the school, some of them guarded by their chauffeurs, who stood in suspicious little groups, smoking in the fashion preferred by chauffeurs, and servants and poachers, and all other men who have to hide the habit, the cigarette cupped in sheltering palm, the burning ember hidden from the gaze of bosses and employers. I shall never forget this long line of hunched, apologetic smoking men staring at us with astonishment as we blazed confidently past, with perhaps the greatest ever of the Great Great-Aunts of England waving with one hand in triumphant greeting as we thundered down upon them.
We drew up sharply at the doors to the school in a spray of gravel.
I adjusted myself with relief in my seat.
‘There.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Thank you, it was really very—’
‘Unnecessary,’ she said, waving me off, preoccupied with arranging the reins in her lap, and waving away half a dozen cats who had appeared as if from nowhere upon our arrival. ‘Run along now.’ I wasn’t sure at first if she meant me or the cats: she meant me.<
br />
‘My name is Stephen Sefton by the way,’ I said, putting out my hand.
‘Jolly good,’ she said, neither shaking my hand nor even glancing in my direction. ‘I’m Marjorie Standish.’
This caught me off-guard. ‘You’re … ? Sorry?’
‘Marjorie Standish,’ she repeated. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘No. I see. And so … Are you … related by any chance to—’ I was interrupted before I could get to the end of my question.
‘Related? Ha! Dear boy. I’m the mother!’
And with that she struggled out of the carriage and wobbled off slowly into the school, accompanied by the cats, a porter immediately arriving to lead away the poor exhausted pony.
I was of course long accustomed to schools functioning like primitive tribes, where everyone knows everyone, and is beholden to everyone, and is therefore unable to break the bonds of fealty and filiation: this explains many of the great strengths and very obvious weaknesses of the British public school system. But All Souls was not like a primitive tribe: All Souls was more like a family. An actual family – and blood is of course thicker than water. Or, rather, as Morley might put it, eschewing the obvious in favour of the obscure: ‘For naturally blood will be of kind / Drawn-to blood, where he may it find’ – a couplet he often liked to quote, presumably from some second-rate poet from Morley’s Complete Collection of Minor English Verse (1929).
Outside in the courtyard stood the two policemen I had seen earlier in the day. They were talking between themselves. I nodded to them and hurried into the school. I assumed – as Alex had insisted – that everything was in hand.
Inside, everything was now shipshape and shining – not least because the boys and staff had given most surfaces, including the paintings, and very likely the crockery and the cutlery also, a thick coat of coach varnish, the smell of which obscured, though did not entirely hide, the reek of yesterday’s cooking and the ever present stench of schoolboy sweat.
