6
We had been standing for ever, outside the station at Otford, the group of us. A hard moon pinging up and down like a table-tennis ball dancing on a fountain. Day/night, day/night: to the end of time. The death of the cosmos in William Hope Hodgson’s Wellsian fantasy, The House on the Borderland.
We posed for photographs beside the fence: WE’RE WORKING ON YOUR STATION/RAILTRACK. We were a self-conscious restatement of Samuel Palmer’s gang, the Shoreham Ancients; city folk up for a ramble. Too loud. Too early. Too many.
Time was squeezing, closing us down: 27 September 1999. We had three months – three walks? – to make it back to Waltham Abbey and down the Lea Valley to the Millennium Dome. Before the Big Night.
The Darent Valley brought them out of their pits: Kevin Jackson (who had been in strict training, jogging up library steps, marching to the bar) and Marc Atkins, loping towards the ticket machine at London Bridge, at the finely calculated last moment; the depth of stubble on his cranium precisely duplicating that on his chin. Kevin’s leather jacket, which dazzled the payroll boys in the station cafe at Staines, has contracted leprosy. It’s been on manoeuvres. It may, unilaterally, have invaded somewhere hot and dusty. Kevin grins, blinks. Hands in pockets (baggy tracksuit trousers). Trainers instead of boots. Big hair, head on the tilt. ‘Moose’, his friend Peter Carpenter calls him. I can see it, the powerful head as a trophy: nailed to the wall. He’s serious about this walk, serious about cutting back on the reference books. He’s here to be here. To pick up camera tips from Marc.
We’re happy to be heading for the Thames at Dartford. But, even though we’ll be travelling within a few fields of the M25, we are losing its acoustic footprints. The chalk hills, covered in beechwood, will act as a baffle. We have to take the continued presence of the motorway on trust; believing that it won’t let us down. It’ll be there at the finish.
A full moon, analgesic, above a double-camera surveillance pole. Crossed contrails. The pink (of an experimental rabbit’s eye) over Sevenoaks and the Weald. Rain has been promised: hence, my golfing umbrella. I picked it up in Middlesex Street for £3. I hate umbrellas, the way they poke at you on narrow pavements; the look of them, mean when furled, dangerous in action. A downpour drove me to it. This umbrella, brought out for the first time, gave a certain bounce to our Otford survey. It was useful for pointing at fancy brickwork, repelling the natives.
The well of St Thomas à Becket is to be found in private grounds. We prowl the boundaries. Renchi attempts conversation with a dog walker who has acquired the full English dog-walking kit: green wellies, shooting jacket (velvet shoulder-patches), Black Forest hat with optional ear flaps. A monster hound, shaggy and sodden, tracks us, barging into our knees, demanding attention.
The town is asleep and therefore as close as it’s going to come to being outside time. Otford and the Darent Valley connect with remembrances of pre-industrial Europe; poplars, gardens with statues and fountains, vineyards, grey walls topped with red tiles. Low hills in soft light. The villa. Roman traces that haven’t been totally obliterated by road and railway.
The duck pond is listed. And the ducks get a food allowance from the parish council. The greengrocer and the chemist have given up, closed down. Countryside hangs on to anything that can be turned into a postcard, but is uninterested in preserving community (though debating it continually, as a way of keeping out disruptive influences, unsuitable immigrants). It works pretty well if you can afford it; if you shop in the Bluewater quarry.
We touch the walls of buildings to dowse for lost heat. St Bartholomew’s Church, with its sharp flints and whitish clunch, ironstone from the Lower Greensand, material cannibalised from Roman middens, is a geological accretion; an expression of place scratched out of the immediate locality. Visitors moon around, in quest of revelation, expecting the unexpected, the previously unnoticed clue. Pevsner descriptions, lists of physical features, dates, methods of construction, don’t help. Old superstitions stay with us. The church as a fixture in time, a place of compulsory attendance: christened, confirmed, married, buried. Heritaged grass squeaks with forgotten voices, clumsy boots tramping over dead faces.
We have to accept the version written on the board. A detached tower stands for an ecclesiastical palace, gifted by Cranmer to Henry VIII. An outsider, such as the poet/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, can take a pile of medieval bricks, an arch or a barn, and give them back to us as an energised version of Chaucer. Riffraff and rentboys supplying the faces. The British have too much respect for antiquity to let it live. We need the strings, the madrigals, the explainers. Superstition draws us to these scars; we circle and poke. Bruce Chatwin quotes Werner Herzog: ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.’
We’re walking tourists. We pass through landscapes on which we have no claim. We spend money in pubs. We visit the obligatory sights: churches, parks, bunkers, villages with literary or painterly associations. We take photographs. But, alongside the convivial agenda, is a ritual purpose: to exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the Dome, to celebrate the sprawl of London. Historical accuracy is less important, Chatwin asserts on Herzog’s behalf, than ‘authenticity of tone’. The English look ridiculous when they try to do a Kinski, pop-eyed, dirty white suit: the glare of unconsummated narcissism. Marc, who has been known to get his kit off as a performance artist, does his best. Raise your camera and he’ll confront it. But the laugh is just a breath away, the ironic snort.
The Darent is high, fast-flowing after recent rain. Our path is clearly marked. We spot a kingfisher. By tall hedges, through fields and golf courses, we track the river to Shoreham. The young Darent clears debris to work a passage through the chalk. What seems to be a random sequence of twists and turns is no such thing. Rivers, so Kit Hart (of Islington’s Hart Gallery) tells me, demonstrate a ‘fundamental relationship between mathematics and science’. (Kit was quoting from Fermat’s Last Theorem.) The length of a river (as walked, from source to mouth, following every meander) is three times the distance as the crow flies. ‘The ratio is approximately 3.14… the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.’
Indulging every whim of the Darent, putting in those extra miles, will remind us of the motorway orbit. Whatever we attempt, it will always feel three times as far as we expect. Distance is stretched to achieve a more satisfying sense of time.
It comes as a shock to find Shoreham where it is, so close to London. I suppose, with confused notions of Blake’s Felpham (a suburb of Bognor Regis), I’d always assumed that Palmer’s Shoreham was hidden among the South Downs: that Shoreham was in fact the Sussex Shoreham, Shoreham-by-Sea. Domesticated, after the Bloomsbury style, with a touch of Eric Gill’s community at Ditchling. A morning’s drive away. Shoreham was an exportable fable, an idyll; suspect, fraudulent, magical. Fixed at the equinox.
Nothing of the sort. Shoreham rubs shoulders with the Swanley interchange, with Brands Hatch, Orpington. Shoreham is just a wheel-spin off the M25. Staying on the road, you don’t notice it. It doesn’t register. No theme park, no shopping mall, no imprisoned animals.
Samuel Palmer was more perceptive; as a child, accompanying his father (another Sam), he tramped through Greenwich, Blackheath, Dulwich. Long excursions, hand in hand, by two troubled humans seeking out hinge places, transfiguring experiences. There were no angel trees in Palmer’s Dulwich. The golden light was always in the next field. The Palmers knew the area between Greenwich Park and Dulwich as: ‘the Gate into the World of Vision’.
The bright, sickly child (asthma, bronchitis) who had to be regularly braced at Margate and the restless man (bribed by his family to give up trade and behave like a pensioned gent) wandered for miles, eager to escape the gravity of London. The Valley of Vision was identified – as a moral landscape out of John Bunyan. Raymond Lister, the Palmer biographer, opens his study with a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress.
Yea, I think there was a kind of sympathy between that Valley and him. For I never saw him bet
ter in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that Valley.
The orthodox account of Palmer is: precocious child, brief period – in the wake of his meeting with William Blake – of achievement at Shoreham (an Eden of light), marriage, visit to Italy, long decline into production-belt pieties.
There is truth in it, but the conventional picture (visionary succumbing to dreary domesticity) has led to the decline in Palmer’s reputation: he’s tagged as a follower of Blake, a proto-hippie who got religion. But Palmer, as premature psychogeographer, deserves reconsideration. Some of his letters to fellow Ancients, Richmond and Frederick Tatham, are as wild and freewheeling as Neal Cassady. Everything of Palmer’s present, his now, had to be squeezed on to those pages. The Shoreham postman becomes a messenger of fate, waiting to bear away every compulsive communication before its argument can be concluded. The sheets of paper, so his correspondents felt, must have been torn from Palmer’s hands.
He was never prepared, even when his father-in-law John Linnell pressed him, to make an accurate record of natural forms, the scene that stood before him. In his sketchbooks, Palmer allowed forms to become archetypes. He scribbled in the margins, talked to himself:
Note that when you go to Dulwich it is not enough on coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts about those sweet fields into a sentimental and Dulwich looking whole No but considering Dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer.
Shoreham is still a removed place, a cleft between close hills. We felt its shadowy, covert nature – dark cottages, tangled orchards; it was damp, folded in on itself and its history. Otford was more exposed, caught at a sharp angle between two motorways, M25 and M26. Shoreham was hidden. A sudden turn, a drop in the road, and out of nowhere we’re up against the church and the river.
The old High Street was dead. Victorian shops kept their shape, but no longer had a purpose. There was nothing to sell. In 1914 there were twenty shops in the village, now there is one. The only active concern is a small house that, from May to September, doubles as an Aircraft Museum. Relics from the Battle of Britain. The operators have a box of leaflets at their door, soliciting ‘aircraft parts, uniforms, eye witness accounts of any aircraft shot down over Southern England during World War II’. The Paul Nash moment is always a possibility in the Kentish woods and fields: the shattered fuselage, the opaque cockpit containing a skull in a flying helmet. A wristwatch around bone.
Renchi has found someone to interrogate: a man (with unnaturally black hair) wearing a light blue shirt and dark blue, sleeveless sweater. A uniform of sorts. Renchi, who lives in the country, recognised him as a postman. In Hackney, we’ve forgotten that such occupations still exist. Even here the post office is a private house, its ancient logo another heritage decoration. The postman points the way to Palmer’s cottage.
Although it looks the part, and we invade the grounds to fire off a fusillade of photographs, this is not Palmer’s cottage: SAMUEL PALMER SCHOOL OF FINE ART. The house, Reed-beds, is where Australian artist Frank White set up his school in 1958. Timber-framed, lead-windowed, with cross beams, panels of blackened flint, the school is altogether too much: Palmer’s life as it should have been.
Renchi won’t buy it. Usually the first to invade any property that comes our way, he stays in the road. ‘Arty,’ he growls – when I photograph the heavy, moist apples that hang low in the orchard behind the house. The whole set is a commentary on Palmer, and Palmer’s Shoreham, and nothing to do with the man or his work. Teaching was the bane, the anguish of Palmer’s married life: it was the only way of generating a small income, hours of drudgery. It saw him banished to West London and Redhill. Letters, from now on, would be about bills, money, American stocks: ‘the kind of people we are obliged to associate with – and from whom I get pupils’.
Palmer lived in a dirty and dilapidated cottage known as ‘Rat Abbey’. And then at Water House. When he came with Tatham to the Valley of Vision in the spring of 1826, it was an escape, a chance to play at being ‘Ancients’. As with Pre-Raphaelites, Arties and Crafties, hippies, the paradigm was lost in the past: medieval, Gothic – without plagues, torture, hunger and ice. Discretionary poverty. Cider. Bread. Cheese. Nuts. Green tea. Optional peasants bringing in the hops. Poverty which, in Palmer’s case (as with so many of Notting Hill’s countercultural elite of the Sixties), was underwritten by a small private income and a property portfolio. A legacy from his grandfather allowed him 5s. 2d. a week. His Shoreham holdings included: ‘a Dwelling House Two Tenements… another Dwelling House… containing Seven Apartments and Pantrys, and Seven Sleeping Rooms above; also sundry Timber Built Sheds and a small Barn and Stabling’. William Yates, a wheelwright, paid a yearly rental of £21 – ‘of which Samuel Palmer always returned One Pound, and this in spite of the opening of the London Chatham and Dover Railway in 1860 with possible developments for the Shoreham Valley’.
Coming away from the small room where Blake and his wife lodged, off the Strand, the Ancients took Shoreham as the realisation of a (misunderstood) pastoral idyll. These door-knob kissing sentimentalists tumbled, by accident, through the gilded frame. And entered a Valley of Vision.
Palmer to Richmond, November 1827:
I have beheld as in the spirit, such nooks, caught such glimpses of the perfumed and enchanted twilight – of natural midsummer, as well as, at some other times of day, other scenes, as passed thro’ the intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy, would divinely consist with the severe and stately port of the human, as with the moon thron’d among constellations, and varieties of lesser glories, the regal pomp and glistening brilliance and solemn attendance of her starry train.
This ‘intense separating transmuting heat of the soul’s alchymy’ is what Palmer chased – even when the result was a portfolio of waxy, impacted views and willed visions. The claustrophobic tightness of his compositions reflects the hermetic self-satisfaction of the Darent Valley: moons become blades, elm and beech and oak are pressed into bloodless rituals. Treat the Shoreham paintings as unlocated eclogues and they are revealed as Christmas cards, labels for honey jars; but track them to source, bringing some of Linnell’s Calvinistic exactitude to the task, and the window opens.
The Ancients, sneaking about in thunderstorms, hiding in hollows, tramping the woods at night, were suspect. ‘Extollagers’, the locals called them: conjurers, mountebanks. Their three-legged camp stools were taken for magical instruments. Suspicions were justified. Hymns in cornfields. Shakespeare’s witches summoned to Jenkin’s Neck Wood.
Parodic fecundity. Plump apples. Legless sheep like cottonwool maggots. Church spire as pyramid. ‘The clouds drop fatness,’ Palmer wrote on the mount of The Valley Thick with Corn. The yokel in the fields doesn’t labour, he reads a book: as if the harvest were to be brought in by the proper order of words, by magic. Such prolix ripeness makes its contrary inevitable: virus, pestilence, burning pits.
Blake’s visions were anchored in the ordinary. They happened. Angel trees. Voices. Visitations from the mythic dead. They dropped in, his gods, when it was convenient for the Lambeth artisan to receive them, when the day’s work was done. Glistening fleas with bowls of blood. If they made a nuisance of themselves, they could be dismissed.
The walk, the journey out, was Palmer’s method. If he pushed hard enough, he would surely arrive at the Valley of Vision. It was there to be found – beyond Forest Hill and Bromley. Visionary tourism. Of the kind we practised; linking place with place, going with the drift, meandering through burial grounds and golf courses.
‘It is not enough coming home to make recollections in which shall be united the scattered parts.’ I knew that Palmer was right; the uniting of parts was beyond me. What should I make of Palmer’s visit to Hackney? He hadn’t wanted to go, to stay with a Welshman in Pembroke House, a private asylum. But he was obliged by the overweening pressure of Celtic hospitality – and his hope that
‘a day at Hackney from which I cannot get off will give me fresh vigour for a new set of work’. Rural Hackney, a suburb of market gardens and madhouses, captured Samuel Palmer – for one night only. He was interrupted, dragged away from a half-finished drawing; brought to sleep in a house of troubled dreamers. Hackney and Shoreham were twinned, in order to promote future pilgrimages. ‘Fresh vigour’. The kind of journey that exists only if it is worth recording.
In Palmer’s day, as he points out in a letter to John Linnell, it was ‘very nearly as cheap’ to buy produce in Shoreham as in Borough Market, Southwark. Under the arches, by Southwark Cathedral, hops could be ‘got retail at less price than you would have paid for in its own garden’. Villages within a forty-mile circuit of London found themselves buying their own goods back – at a premium. The retail logic of Bluewater was already in place.
The Shoreham produce on which Palmer and his mates glutted themselves was only there because the local farmers supplied the London markets. The Ancients picnicked on loss-leaders, damaged goods; windfall that wasn’t required in the city. Tastes that were too unsophisticated for metropolitans.
In September 1999, at Palmer’s favourite season, no breakfast was to be had in the village. So the postman informed us. No call for it. We must go out onto the road, the A225, to a coffee stall.
Huge sunflowers sway against the red brick of the church wall, BLESSED ARE THE DEAD. So it says on the lych gate (where the bier was set down, during burial services, to await the coming of the clergyman). Marc Atkins stoops to photograph a sundial. A yew walk leads the eye towards low hills.
We straggle out of town. And there, in a lay-by on the busy Shoreham Road, is Daisy’s van: dispenser of monster burgers to the carriage trade. A forlorn cyclist in yellow helmet, rain top and tights is the only other customer. Daisy’s cuisine is criminal, the double cheeseburger is obscenely good value. It oozes yolk and tomato sauce and melted goo. Even Marc’s veggie burger looks a shovel of squashed hedgehog. His side order of retried potatoes, a coronary indulgence, spills from the plate. Rain drips into our blue-glaze coffee mugs. We settle ourselves around several white plastic tables, munching and monologuing, and trying to make ourselves heard above the traffic, the downpour; the commuter trains squealing into Shoreham station.
London Orbital Page 41
