Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  Thus it was that a young cosmochelonian of the Steady Gait faction, testing a new telescope with which he hoped to make measurements of the precise albedo of Great A’Tuin’s right eye, was on this eventful evening the first outsider to see the smoke rise hubward from the burning of the oldest city in the world.

  Later that night he became so engrossed in his studies he completely forgot about it. Nevertheless, he was the first.

  There were others . . .

  (1983)

  Tony Robinson is known as Britain’s foremost face of popular history, after presenting twenty seasons of Channel 4’s archaeology series Time Team, and also as the creator of the globally beloved character Baldrick in Blackadder. He is an award-winning television writer, and has published over thirty children’s books as well as several works for adult readers. Other varied television includes an acclaimed documentary about the elderly, entitled Me and My Mum. An ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society since 2008 and Patron of Readathon, Robinson was appointed KBE in 2013.

  ★

  Dreamwood

  by Adrienne Rich

  In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand

  there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see

  or the child’s older self, a poet,

  a woman dreaming when she should be typing

  the last report of the day. If this were a map,

  she thinks, a map laid down to memorize

  because she might be walking it, it shows

  ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert

  here and there a sign of aquifers

  and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map

  it would be the map of the last age of her life,

  not a map of choices but a map of variations

  on the one great choice. It would be the map by which

  she could see the end of touristic choices,

  of distances blued and purpled by romance,

  by which she would recognize that poetry

  isn’t revolution but a way of knowing

  why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced

  wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,

  mass-produced yet durable, being here now,

  is what is yet a dream-map

  so obdurate, so plain,

  she thinks, the material and the dream can join

  and that is the poem and that is the late report.

  (1987)

  ★

  Extract from The Wild Places

  by Robert Macfarlane

  The poet and musician Ivor Gurney was born and brought up in rural Gloucestershire at around the end of the nineteenth century. For his family, as for many at that time, the long country walk was a habit and a pleasure. Like the poet Edward Thomas – whom Gurney admired – he grew up as a natural historian, exploring Gloucestershire’s riverbanks, woods and hedges.

  The loving intensity of Gurney’s relationship with the Gloucestershire landscape rings throughout the poetry and letters he wrote as a young man, and the journals he kept. He observed how the fields enjoyed a ‘clear shining after the rain’, and wrote of the wide River Severn ‘homing to the sea’. Of all aspects of the countryside it was woodland he loved best, with its ‘avenues of green and gold’. A composer as well as a poet, timber and timbre were to Gurney closely grown together: among the many poems he set to music were his own ‘Song of the Summer Woods’ and A. E. Housman’s ‘Loveliest of Trees’.

  In 1915, Gurney joined up to fight in the Great War. His first posting was to Sarras, on the Ypres Salient. When Gurney arrived at Ypres, the Salient had been a battle area for two years, and the landscape he found there was a dark travesty of the countryside he had left behind. Before the war, Sarras with its rivers, orchards, woods and pastures might have resembled Gurney’s Gloucestershire. But two years of conflict had transformed it. Mud, midway between fluid and solid, threatened to drown men and entomb them simultaneously. On the military maps of the area that Gurney used, some of the old names of the landscape remained. But many of the new names spoke of the avoidance of death, or of its arrival. Shrapnel Corner, Crump Farm, Hellfire Corner, Halfway House, Dead Dog Farm, Battle Wood, Sanctuary Wood. The woods were no longer there, however; these were ghost names only. The trees had been felled for revetting, or blasted from the earth by shells. The only evidence of the forest that remained were upright bare dead trunks, stripped of leaves, branches and bark by shrapnel and gunfire. At their bases, human bones protruded from the mud like roots, and blood salted the earth.

  To Gurney, writing home, it seemed he had come to an anti-landscape, whose featurelessness was a form of assault: ‘Masses of unburied dead strewn over the battle fields; no sign of organized trenches, but merely shell holes joined up to one another . . . and no landmarks anywhere.’ The Salient denied the permanence, the rich and complicated pasts of the trees that Gurney cherished: their consoling constancy, their rootedness.

  In the trenches, he was seized often by what he called a ‘hot heart desire’ for his Gloucestershire landscape. He was ‘clutched at and heart-grieved’ by ‘desperate home thoughts’ of ‘Cotswold, her spinnies’. ‘We suffer pain out here,’ he wrote home, ‘and for myself it sometimes comes that death would be preferable to such a life.’

  But Gurney survived the war. He was injured – shot in the chest, and gassed – and invalided home. Shortly after the Armistice, he entered upon a period of frenzied creativity. Between 1919 and 1922, he wrote some nine hundred poems and two hundred and fifty songs. Walking and inspiration became intertwined for Gurney. He strode the countryside both day and night, often for hours. The letters he sent during these years speak of how much he ‘needed’ the night-walking in particular. At night, he was able to follow what he called ‘the white ways . . . unvisited by most’, which was, he said, a form of ‘discovery’. ‘O that night!’, he wrote to a friend. ‘Meteors flashed like sudden inspirations of song down the sky. The air was too still to set firs or beeches sighing, but – O the depth of it!’ He spoke of ‘brambles beautiful in wind’, of the ‘black greenery of beech against the moon’, of how a low moon threw into relief the ‘still sky-rims . . . high above the valley’, and of ‘bronzed cloud-bar at cold dawn’. ‘Earth, air, and water,’ he wrote late in that period of his life, ‘are the true sources of song or speaking.’

  By 1922, Gurney’s mental state, always precarious, had tilted into unbalance. He took to eating in binges, and then fasting for days. He lost weight quickly, and his behaviour became increasingly unpredictable. His family reluctantly committed him to the care of the asylum system. He went first to an institution in Gloucester, and then to one at Dartford in Kent. In both asylums, he was not permitted to walk outside the perimeter of the grounds.

  It was to the Dartford asylum that Helen Thomas, the widow of Edward Thomas – who had been killed at the Battle of Arras – travelled on several occasions in the late 1920s to visit Gurney. She later reported that, when she first saw him, his madness was so acute that he was able to communicate only briefly with her, and showed little interest in her presence, or her association with Edward.

  The next time she travelled to Dartford, however, Helen took with her one of her husband’s Ordnance Survey maps of the Gloucestershire landscape which both Thomas and Gurney had walked. She recalled afterwards that Gurney, on being shown the map, took it at once from her, and spread it out on his bed, in his hot little white-tiled room in the asylum, with the sunlight falling in patterns upon the floor. Then the two of them kneeled together by the bed and traced out, with their fingers, walks that they and Edward had taken in the past.

  For an hour or more this dream-walking went on, Gurney seeing not the map, but looking through its prompts to see land itself. ‘He spent that hour,’ Helen remembered, ‘revisiting his beloved home . . . spotting . . . a track, a hill, or a wood, and seeing it all in his mind’s eye, a mental vision sharper and more actual for his heightened intensity. He trod,
in a way we who were sane could not emulate, the lands and fields he knew and loved so well, his guide being his finger tracing the way on the map . . . He had Edward as his companion in this strange perambulation . . . I became for a while the element which brought Edward back to life for him and the country where the two could wander together.’

  Helen returned to visit Gurney several times after this, and on each occasion she brought the map that had been made soft and creased by her husband’s hands, and she and Gurney knelt at the bed and together walked through their imagined country.

  (2007)

  ★

  The Songs I Had

  by Ivor Gurney

  The songs I had are withered

  Or vanished clean,

  Yet there are bright tracks

  Where I have been,

  And there grow flowers

  For other’s delight.

  Think well, O singer,

  Soon comes night.

  (c. 1920–1922)

  ★

  ANNE FINE

  I live in rural County Durham and walk my dog through an enormous river-field in which a gentle spring occasionally becomes a torrent. I’ve watched the farmer try to block the spring. I’ve watched him attempt to re-route it. And I’ve watched him give up.

  It’s always cheering to see the countryside outsmart a landowner with fine ideas, and I can imagine a present-day Hobden grinning each time he strolls past.

  The Land

  by Rudyard Kipling

  When Julius Fabricius, Sub-Prefect of the Weald,

  In the days of Diocletian owned our Lower River-field,

  He called to him Hobdenius – a Briton of the Clay,

  Saying: ‘What about that River-piece for layin’ in to hay?’

  And the aged Hobden answered: ‘I remember as a lad

  My father told your father that she wanted dreenin’ bad.

  An’ the more that you neglect her the less you’ll get her clean.

  Have it jest as you’ve a mind to, but, if I was you, I’d dreen.’

  So they drained it long and crossways in the lavish Roman style—

  Still we find among the river-drift their flakes of ancient tile,

  And in drouthy middle August, when the bones of meadows show,

  We can trace the lines they followed sixteen hundred years ago.

  Then Julius Fabricius died as even Prefects do,

  And after certain centuries, Imperial Rome died too.

  Then did robbers enter Britain from across the Northern main

  And our Lower River-field was won by Ogier the Dane.

  Well could Ogier work his war-boat – well could Ogier wield his brand—

  Much he knew of foaming waters – not so much of farming land.

  So he called to him a Hobden of the old unaltered blood,

  Saying: ‘What about that River-piece; she doesn’t look no good?’

  And that aged Hobden answered ‘’Tain’t for me to interfere,

  But I’ve known that bit o’ meadow now for five and fifty year.

  Have it jest as you’ve a mind to, but I’ve proved it time on time,

  If you want to change her nature you have got to give her lime!’

  Ogier sent his wains to Lewes, twenty hours’ solemn walk,

  And drew back great abundance of the cool, grey, healing chalk.

  And old Hobden spread it broadcast, never heeding what was in’t,—

  Which is why in cleaning ditches, now and then we find a flint.

  Ogier died. His sons grew English – Anglo-Saxon was their name—

  Till out of blossomed Normandy another pirate came;

  For Duke William conquered England and divided with his men,

  And our Lower River-field he gave to William of Warenne.

  But the Brook (you know her habit) rose one rainy autumn night

  And tore down sodden flitches of the bank to left and right.

  So, said William to his Bailiff as they rode their dripping rounds:

  ‘Hob, what about that River-bit – the Brook’s got up no bounds?’

  And that aged Hobden answered: ‘’Tain’t my business to advise,

  But ye might ha’ known ’twould happen from the way the valley lies.

  Where ye can’t hold back the water you must try and save the sile.

  Hev it jest as you’ve a mind to, but, if I was you, I’ spile!’

  They spiled along the water-course with trunks of willow-trees,

  And planks of elms behind ’em and immortal oaken knees.

  And when the spates of Autumn whirl the gravel-beds away

  You can see their faithful fragments, iron-hard in iron clay.

  *

  Georgii Quinti Anno Sexto, I, who own the River-field,

  Am fortified with title-deeds, attested, signed and sealed,

  Guaranteeing me, my assigns, my executors and heirs

  All sorts of powers and profits which – are neither mine nor theirs.

  I have rights of chase and warren, as my dignity requires.

  I can fish – but Hobden tickles. I can shoot – but Hobden wires.

  I repair, but he reopens, certain gaps which, men allege,

  Have been used by every Hobden since a Hobden swapped a hedge.

  Shall I dog his morning progress o’er the track-betraying dew?

  Demand his dinner-basket into which my pheasant flew?

  Confiscate his evening faggot under which my conies ran,

  And summons him to judgement? I would sooner summons Pan.

  His dead are in the churchyard – thirty generations laid.

  Their names were old in history when Domesday Book was made;

  And the passion and the piety and prowess of his line

  Have seeded, rooted, fruited in some land the Law calls mine.

  Not for any beast that burrows, not for any bird that flies,

  Would I lose his large sound council, miss his keen amending eyes.

  He is bailiff, woodman, wheelwright, field-surveyor, engineer,

  And if flagrantly a poacher – ’tain’t for me to interfere.

  ‘Hob, what about that River-bit?’ I turn to him again,

  With Fabricius and Ogier and William of Warenne.

  ‘Hev it jest as you’ve a mind to, but’ – and here he takes command.

  For whoever pays the taxes old Mus’ Hobden owns the land.

  (1917)

  Anne Fine published her first novel, The Summer House Loon, in 1978 and has been writing for both adults and children ever since, winning numerous prizes including the Guardian Award and both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread (now Costa) Award twice over. Her novels include Goggle-Eyes (1989), Bill’s New Frock (1990), Flour Babies (1992), The Tulip Touch (1996) and Blood Family (2013). Her novel Madame Doubtfire (1987) was adapted into the 1993 film Mrs Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams. Fine was the second Children’s Laureate (2001–2003).

  ★

  Delay

  by Elizabeth Jennings

  The radiance of the star that leans on me

  Was shining years ago. The light that now

  Glitters up there my eyes may never see,

  And so the time lag teases me with how

  Love that loves now may not reach me until

  Its first desire is spent. The star’s impulse

  Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful

  And love arrived may find us somewhere else.

  (1953)

  ★

  Letter to The Cosmos

  by Jimmy Carter

  Jimmy Carter, thirty-ninth US president, sent this statement – recorded in electronic impulses which could in turn be converted into printed words – into the cosmos, aboard the space probe Voyager. Along with it went a gold-plated phonograph record featuring music and greetings in fifty-five languages, as well as the sounds of animals, volcanoes, rain, laughter and a mother’s kiss.

  The President launched that kiss into a sola
r system in which many of the planets have, revealingly, been named after characters from timeless stories or myths – Orion and Jupiter, Mars and Venus.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  June 16, 1977

  This Voyager spacecraft was constructed by the United States of America. We are a community of 240 million human beings among the more than 4 billion who inhabit the planet Earth. We human beings are still divided into nation states, but these states are rapidly becoming a single global civilization.

  We cast this message into the cosmos. It is likely to survive a billion years into our future, when our civilization is profoundly altered and the surface of the Earth may be vastly changed.

  Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy some – perhaps many – may have inhabited planets and spacefaring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message:

  This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.

  We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.

  Jimmy Carter

  President

  United States of America

  ★

  The following story, by cartographer and author Tim Robinson, first appeared as a work of art, in the Royal Academy’s 2015 Summer Exhibition – together with a washer.

  The Tale of the Washer

  by Tim Robinson

  In April 1990, after decades of planning and construction, the Hubble Space Telescope was loaded into the cargo hold of a space shuttle and blasted on the back of a rocket to a height of 559 km, where it was put into orbit around the Earth. At that height the atmosphere is so tenuous that it does not interfere with the Hubble’s view of astronomical objects so faint and faraway as to be beyond the ken of all previous telescopes. The heart of the Hubble is a bowl-shaped mirror, nearly eight feet across and polished to within a hundred-millionths of a millimetre of a perfect hyperboloid, which collects the light from whatever stars and galaxies lie within its field of view and focuses it on a camera of exquisite sensitivity. The prime purpose of this wonderful construction is to pierce the distances curtaining the birth scene of spacetime itself.