The white cliffs become greyer as we pass the moles that protect the Port of Dover. The wind is still stiff from the east. People stream down to the car decks as the ferry performs a neat pirouette and glides into its dock, ropes are thrown, the engines fall quiet, the nose lifts and a ramp comes down. The coach drives us over the gap, and we are in England.
CHAPTER 12
A Swallow Summer: England and Wales
A Swallow Summer: England and Wales
DOVER TURNS A rather weary, almost ramshackle, face to arrivals from the continent. Faded chalk boards offer deals on Sunday lunch; a hotel looks so run-down I long to stay there just to meet its ghosts; an ill-looking man smoking outside a pub gives a blank eye to the through-traffic. The coach hauls us up to the London road and the driver starts the video: a bad American film dubbed defiantly into French. From the motorway there is little to suggest that we have entered a promised land. What Patrice would give to come here, how infinite are all the sacrifices made by all the people from so many of the countries of the earth to get here: France may be the first choice of second home for western Europeans, but from Romania to Kashmir to the Cape Flats, from Turkmenistan to Sri Lanka, it is this low green land that so many long to stand on, under these quietly rolling grey skies.
We enter the city of London at Lewisham. The other passengers stare at the close-packed houses, the traffic, an Italian restaurant dyed grey by exhaust and the multi-national crowds, all wearing the uniform expression of Londoners: part-closed, part-faraway.
‘Can you help me?’ asks the boy in front of me. He is from Congo and he wants to go to Manchester.
We arrive in one corner of Victoria Coach Station; his bus leaves, soon, from another. We run pell-mell through the crowds, buy the ticket and run again and I am amazed to see that nothing is translated into any language other than English. This is the first monolingual country I have arrived in. The Manchester coach driver welcomes the boy aboard in a friendly way and I am alone again, in a crowd of travellers, simultaneously at home, and lost. I call my father. He sounds welcoming, but cautious.
‘Avoir une hirondelle dans la charpente,’ the French say – to have a swallow in your woodwork, like bats in the belfry, means ‘to be mad’. Did I go mad in Gibraltar? It seems my father fears so. My brother, too.
The 19th April is a bright, sharp burst of spring in the suburb where my father lives. My brother stands on a station platform lecturing me with deep concern. I have lost too much weight. I have undergone one hell of a journey. I am not right. I must, must ‘go and see someone’ – do I understand? I do understand, but I am not finished. The journey is not complete. We misunderstand each other. I am unwilling or unable to give up my new habits. I sleep lightly and short. I say I am more than happy to go on living without a mobile phone: my father sees paranoia in this. I am amazed at how precious and pressured everyone’s time is: did I live like this, once, fitting everything into small windows of freedom between work and rest, like putting chocolates into an advent calendar? I want to talk and talk but I can hear myself talking too much. The English, or Londoners, anyway, never talk too much, except when they have been drinking. I feel I have become both too self-contained and too open for their comfort. The webs of email, text messages, carefully timetabled diaries, pencilling-ins and arrangements that will or will not be firmed up, seem to hold everyone together in semi-presence. The idea that you might not know where you will be sleeping the day after tomorrow, and therefore that nobody else can know, seems rabid eccentricity.
For three days now I have seen no swallows and the familiar discomfort is back. Where are they? I must find them. They will be out there, away from the city, coming in like a tide from the south, spreading over the country. Negotiating the trains and tubes without the deadness of familiarity is very strange; horribly tense, in fact. The line of people on the station platform on Monday morning, holding their breath as the minutes count down to the arrival of the train; the barely restrained rush for seats; the sound of people breathing shallowly; the minutely self-conscious shifting of legs, arms and bodies, shuffling into interlocking positions until the carriage becomes a dense mass of human flesh; the intensifying crowds of travellers and trains as we approach Vauxhall; the cattle-like press down into the underpass; the feeling that a step out of place will cause chaos and collision; and above all, all the time, the never-ending harangue of announcements, admonishments and advice from automated voices, station staff, posters and signs: don’t forget this, watch out for that, don’t obstruct, closed-circuit television, stand back, allow passengers, unattended items, security, security, security . . . the word is everywhere, like a fire-alarm half-ringing, as though the air-raid sirens are on permanent stand-by, war has been declared, and we await the arrival of bombers. Nobody speaks, smiles or screams but all express themselves in little huffs of disapproval, acquiescence or inconvenience: the silence of so many bodies seems at once sinister and comical. But it is difficult not to admire this multicoloured, multi-cultural, multi-lingual breed of people, these Londoners, who make their way, every day, in one of the fastest, most expensive, most competitive cities on earth. Tourists look amazed and bemused, as if everyone else is playing a joke on them: they gaze around, mystified, as if waiting for someone to start laughing. When a voice begins speaking behind me I have to crush an urge to turn and join in the conversation. The speaker is a man, and by his accent, a cockney.
‘Used to go down there when we was younger. No one ’ad property down there then, now everyone does. And that other place, bit further along. Bognor Regis.’
The small boy with him says something which I miss.
‘Mullins? Long as he pays ’is own way, the tight sod. Went to Florida with ’im once an’ he came back with the same money he went with. You know those two gold coins he ’ad? Got them off ’is grandmother’s eyelids. That’s what he’s like. Good as gold he is but he can be a right little plum.’ (Laughs.)
The small boy asks something.
‘Yeah, number two in the world he was, true.’
‘He’s on Youtube!’
‘Yeah, there was one bloke above him, an American. He was a bit good. You’re soft on ’im, aintcha? That’s because you’re as soft as doggy do-do in the sun. Don’t worry about Mullins. He’s got plenty stashed away. His missus is the most intelligent woman I’ve ever met in my life and she takes care of ’im . . .’
Oh, the joy of being able to eavesdrop fluently again!
We surface from the tunnels on the conveyor belts of the escalators. There are now digital television screens showing adverts as little films where there used to be defaced posters. Corners and entire quarters of the city have fallen to the wrecking ball and are being remade, but it is the permanence which arrests me. London is grand and mighty: here is the evidence, the acquisition and achievement of empire, from the edifices of the great offices of state to the regal sweep of the terraces, from the cathedral to all the spires, this forest of stone, brass and steel has been culled and collected from across the earth. Cleopatra’s Needle seems typical – this ancient obelisk is here a little bauble, a collector’s item, towed to the Embankment across seas of time and culture, like a caught fish. The British Museum is a pirate’s hoard. Nelson stands on his column at ease, like a landowner surveying his estates. How terribly well London has done. The elegance of the city, its ease with its riches, its imperviousness to time and its indifference to the individual seem to render the crowds ant-like in our scurrying, and termite-sized our little lives, harnessed to serve and maintain it.
I retrieve my old car from under an arch in Battersea and set off west, chasing the sun. It is as though the forward motion of the journey has become a way of life that I cannot surrender. I follow the road south-west to Dorset where I gate-crash an old friend, and leave the next morning, meandering still westwards until at last the road runs down to the coast. I pull the car up beside a small harbour and look around, blinking, to see where I have ended up. There is
a low mist on the sea. People are stretching and yawning and turning their faces to the sun, its bright but slender heat magnified by the cold air. Wandering along the quayside I come face to face with the Ancient Mariner, a sinewy, stricken bronze figure, clutching a spar, with the albatross roped around his neck.
‘We raised the money for it, the townspeople did,’ says the duty curator of the little museum, proudly. The small town is called Watchet and it seems to be a universe entirely of its own, obtusely out of step with time. Two ladies join the curator in a lament for the old harbour, which was replaced with a yacht marina, against their wishes.
‘It’s only usable for a couple of hours at the top of high tide,’ one says, scornfully. ‘The rest of the time those fancy boats just sit on mud.’ Behind them a picture shows a coastal steamer from Wales eternally half-loaded at the quay, a sepia morning preserved in its spotless photo frame.
‘Oh, we used to get the Welsh here, raiding and plundering not so long ago,’ says the curator. ‘There hasn’t been much pillage recently though. The local girls would probably say they miss it!’
On the harbour wall a man is selling organic vegetables from a stall, handing them over with enormous care, as if they were jewels; on a bench a black woman is stretching herself out in the sun like a cat in an over-large coat.
‘Lovely day!’ she says. ‘Like summer.’
‘Yes! First day of spring, anyway.’
‘Do you think so? You might be right, you might be right . . .’
There is a whistle-blast behind us and a steam train comes puffing along the line just above the town. I look up and see two swallows, flying together, heading up the coast.
I follow them along the coast road. It is difficult not to sing at such a beautiful day; the mist lifts slowly off the channel and though I cannot quite see it, I know home is on the other side. There are more swallows over the water meadows of Somerset, hunting the marshy ground around the river Axe. The road winds down into Bristol, through the Avon gorge, then up to the bridge and the giant, ripped surge of the estuary. Up and over, and we are in a bilingual land again. Croeso y Gymru, says a sign, Welcome to Wales.
There are several routes into the hills from the motorway; the one I take goes due north first then branches off, following the river Usk. As soon as you leave the main road you are in a different land: Wales is a small coat made of deep pockets. Suddenly there are little meadows; though it is late afternoon last night’s dew has not lifted. Hedge lines are splashed with blackthorn blossom and the woven greens of oak and ash. The sun is slanting down now and fair weather is coming in from the high south-west. Swallows swerve and twist low across pasture near the Usk; their travel still has that purpose about it; they are still coming on. The river is swollen, I see, there has been rain. It runs with a reddish churn. The fields are halfway to recovery after the winter; some still look tired, where the flocks have been, but the colours of others are deeper and brighter. The celandines are out, the swallow flower which gave the birds their Greek name, chelidon, because they come at the same time. Our valley seems not to have changed at all. I stop the car, get out and breathe in. There is that smell, the smell of the alders by the stream, the sheep fields, the hay in the barns, and something else, a smell as pale as the sky but as sharp as the earth, which nothing else smells like, only this place. A song stops me dead, rich and twisting, bright notes coming from behind and above me. I turn to look up and there is a thrush in the cherry tree, in full voice, and behind it, just there, over 6,000 miles from where I first saw them, are two swallows, a male and a female. We seem to have arrived at exactly the same time.
Swallows and a thrush come together, famously, in Robert Browning’s poem ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’:
Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England – now!
And after April, when May follows,
And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –
That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!
And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children’s dower
– Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!
The poet was in Italy when he wrote it, and through his imagination simultaneously in England, receiving sensations from places he knew, knowing them so well that he can be sure exactly what the blossom looks like, and exactly how the thrush sounds. There is the amazement of the alchemist who has actually made gold in his exclamations – the chaffinch is singing on the orchard bough now! – and you wonder if he did not look up from his desk in Italy and see swallows as he was writing: while everything else in the poem is a conjuring, a picturing, the swallows have the power to be in two places at once.
‘A pair came today,’ my mother says, beaming. ‘The 22nd of April,’ she says, marking the date on her calendar.
And now there are two pairs, and in the following days one pair begins to nest in the derelict part of the house she calls the back kitchen, and eventually raises two broods.
‘The first one came on the 1st of April,’ she says, ‘and I was terribly worried about it because the weather was awful, snow and rain, and he went away again.’
That was the day, April Fool’s, when I asked the girl, laughing but entirely seriously, if she would marry me, and she replied, seriously, I believed, but smiling, that she would, and I gave her my green stone from Zambia, bought from the trusted man and carried surreptitiously across innumerable borders, and she gave me a gold ring, which would only sit comfortably on the third finger of my left hand.
And that was supposed to be that. I thought I would come home, and my Mum would make me a cup of tea, and I would sleep and eat and return to my life, and sit down and tell the story of everything I had seen and done. But it did not turn out like that at all. Within a few days I was in Dorset, teaching a writing course, half bound up in the work and worries of my students and half not there at all, as my gaze followed my mind’s eye out of my room in the writing centre to the water meadows and the telegraph wires, as spring stormed through the trees and hedgerows and a large band of swallows swooped over the fields, then gathered on the wires in chittering groups, exactly as if they were planning another journey.
‘I see your swallows have turned up,’ I said to Noel, a pipe-smoking gentleman who looked like Father Christmas doing the garden, whose wife ran the administrative side of the centre.
‘Oh those aren’t ours,’ he said. ‘Those are someone else’s. They just stop here to hunt. They’ll be on their way north again soon. Ours are still on their way.’
The next day, as predicted, they were gone. I wanted to go with them. I found it impossible to settle anywhere, except where Rebecca was, and soon I found myself in Rochdale, amazed that it was all true: it really had happened, we really did meet in Morocco, and there were les Deux Princesses to prove it, and Rosie, and we really did love each other, and I really did plan to spend my life with her, and with her beautiful little boy. I set myself up in their spare room and began work. Sometimes I ached for the lost notebooks, but not often. As if writing it down as it happened had fixed it firmly in my mind, I had no difficulty returning, in my head, to all the places I had been. I can still see it all now, vividly, as if I was just there.
And because I am a romantic, and because perhaps I really had been knocked sidewa
ys by the journey, I imagined that what had happened to me would be met with universal rejoicing by my family. It was not. Rather than being happy, they were worried to distraction by me. One hot, still morning in June, the day after my mother’s seventieth birthday, I sat in the garden with my family and my Intended, looked up and saw an extraordinary thing.
‘My God!’ I exclaimed. ‘Now I really do know something about swallows which no one else does!’
Half an hour later my brother and mother practically forced me into the car and drove me to see a doctor. I was scared but only half unwilling to go with them. I went partly because Rebecca swore she would not let me be sectioned, and that she would wait and get me out of there when I had seen the doctor, and partly because I was secretly terrified that I might have lost my grip on reality to the point of hallucination.
The doctor asked if I was worried about anything, and I said apart from my family, because they were worried about me, no. He wanted to know if I had had any thoughts of harming myself. No, again. He told me that there was always help available, if I wanted it, and I thanked him, and we said goodbye. But I was worried, terribly worried, because I thought I had seen something that I could not have seen: if I was hallucinating then I was surely in serious trouble.
A Single Swallow Page 30
