Nothing much on Palmer remains in print; the connection with Shoreham is kept alive by the tourist industry, by an extension of the blue plaque thesis. Addresses are of interest if a literary or social association can be claimed. The story must be grounded. The Valley Thick with Corn is franchised as a Shoreham illustration, even though its location is generic – and it dates from the period immediately before Palmer moved out of London.
The specific was always troublesome. In 1849, long after he left Shoreham, Palmer wrote: ‘If I am spared to go again into the country I hope to begin a new plan – not sitting down to local matter, but walking and watching.’ Walking and watching defined his art. Fretful movement to discover a landscape window, a boudoir of the picturesque – to be prettied up, peeked at through scratched spectacles.
As a sickly, hypochondriac old man exiled to Redhill, Palmer was ordered by his medical adviser to take some exercise. He had managed no more, in months, than an arthritic shuffle around the garden, kicking at weeds. Beyond the limits of his property, two walks were possible: ‘he dreaded the ordeal of either route’. The view had been ruined, he spluttered in traditional suburbanite fashion, by developers. Wrapped in an enveloping Inverness cloak, a copy of Virgil’s Bucolics in his pocket, he dragged himself to a certain five-barred gate.
‘Having touched the gate-post,’ as his son Herbert reports, ‘he returned scowling with anger and disgust much as a member of a chain gang goes back after exercise to prison.’
The business of the gate is pertinent. Gates are handy as destinations, somewhere to lean, a framing device: they promote a view. Weekenders walk to gates. Remember the sequence in Joseph Losey’s Accident? (Screenplay by Harold Pinter from a novel by Nicholas Mosley.) The unstructured Sunday afternoon (tennis, overlapping meals, booze, boredom): a short country stroll to work up a thirst, a five-barred gate. A few ominously inconsequential remarks: flies, nettles, corrugated earth.
When the M25 circuit had been completed, and much of the first draft written, Renchi and I returned to Kent to find a five-barred gate. Palmer’s Valley of Vision, stretching from Dulwich to Shoreham, didn’t finish there: it went on with the Darent to Otford, and beyond. A day’s walk to the south: to Underriver. The Golden Valley: the ‘heat of the soul’s infabulous alchymy’. Palmer’s nocturnal ramblings took him into the hills above Sevenoaks, where he watched the sun rise over ‘the flower of Kentish scenery’.
After marriage and the Italian tour, Palmer settled in London – but made regular excursions to Cornwall and Wales, in search of exploitable scenery. From Tintern Abbey he wrote to George Richmond, begging him to ‘come hither’. The sublime in its tamest form appealed to Palmer. He had no taste for the cosmic agitation of Turner. ‘After my pastoral has had a month’s stretching into epic I feel here a most grateful relaxation and am become once more a pure quaint crinkle-crankle goth,’ he gushed.
The quaint and the crinkle-crankle are what he found at Underriver. He lodged at Underriver House – now a private property, unhandsome but very sure of itself. Palmer and Linnell produced reams of five-barred gates, views from an eminence on Rook’s Hill: Linnell’s ‘Underriver’, Palmer’s The Golden Valley, or Harvesting with Distant Prospect. We set out to find this spot. Renchi had his sketchbook, his coloured pens.
The morning was misty: we saw nothing beyond the hawsers as we crossed the Dartford Bridge. At Underriver, the mist lifted. We parked in a pub and set off through the usual empty lanes. The Palmer franchise was everywhere in evidence: unpicked fruit, blackberries in the hedges, orchards, cobwebs on gates. Round the back of Underriver House, at the end of a gravel drive, we spotted something that might have inspired Palmer’s pen and ink drawing of 1829, Ancient Barn. Except that the barn had enjoyed a tasteful and imaginative makeover (along with every other Kentish oast house): it was now, certainly, a property – with studio windows, bright wood, a managed garden.
A man we met in the lane – affable, alert, in trainers and jogging gear, walking a lean dog (with a pedigree that shamed us) – confirmed the barn’s provenance. He was the owner. It was murder, he said, for an hour every morning (ten minutes from the motorway), then peace returned. The Golden Valley was regilded. It seemed an enviable way of life: morning walk, restored barn. If you had the equity.
Past Absaloms, another heritage farm, we climbed Rooks Hill. Remembering the Palmer catalogue – Near Underriver (c. 1843) and View from Rooks Hill (1843) – we felt sure we were on the right track for our five-barred gate (now replaced by a stile). Yes, this was it. The same gap in the trees. The Golden Valley revealed, pretty much as the painters had it. Palmer’s red-roof barn is now a corrugated shed. His melancholy cattle are pigs in hooped shelters; industrial swine, pre-bacon lollers in shit. A few goats. From the corrugated shed, a screeching of guinea fowl (who have just had their fortunes told) puts the necessary tremble into the landscape.
As Renchi sketches, the mist clears. A reference book – Underriver (Samuel Palmer’s Golden Valley) by Griselda Barton and Michael Tong – is open on his lap; the double page of Linnell and Palmer spread out for comparison. A line of poplars interrupts the prospect. Gentle hills to the south, the rim of the Weald. Palmer doesn’t do smell or sound (as Breughel does), he’s interested in grading light; achieving float, solipsism. A landscape voyeur. A peeper through curtains of foliage. He prospects, he acts as a pimp for estate agents and developers. This place is magic: buy it.
We returned to Shoreham by the back route, avoiding Seven-oaks. It was important, we felt, to make the sideways link with the M25. On the day of that first expedition, with Kevin and Marc, we had walked the Darent Valley like a ditch – seeing trains, but having to imagine the motorway.
Driving out of London towards the coast, you might notice a traffic-monitoring camera on a pole sticking out of woodland, just after Junction 4. That was our marker. To the west of Shoreham you climb steeply; the village tidies itself away, leaving the church spire. You come up alongside the chalk cross, mentioned on the war memorial by the river. After the first ascent, through Meenfield Wood, you hear the chant of the M25. Intimations of civilisation.
Down across fields to Timberden Bottom, then another brief ascent to the tunnel under the motorway. Shivering against a five-barred gate is a dying animal, a sheep covered in flies. There are no shepherds, few farms. Renchi sets off to find a human who might be interested in the loss of his investment. Empty houses, barking dogs: no resolution. A mascara of black insects outlines the sheep’s blank stare, the white rubber eyes. They feed on dead sight.
Renchi is being slightly mysterious about our destination: Badger’s Mount (which is depicted on the OS map as an enclosure of spiked huts). When we emerge on the west side, the motorway is still with us, visible through the woods. We are back inside the hoop. We circumnavigate Badger’s Mount, which is indeed an enigma, coy about its attractions. The perimeter is a wilderness of impenetrable scrub, low fences woven in, piss-off signs (courtesy of MOD).
A fortnight after the World Trade Center attack, paranoia is justified; it sings. Now I remember a postcard Renchi sent, after the first Shoreham walk, that said:
In Cambridge I dug again for anecdotal reference to unblock the blank disguise of the North Downs and discovered there was an Earth Tremor in Westerham in the 18th century that shook buildings and caused more than a ripple on the pond. Sadly the earth did not open quite wide enough to swallow two of their local heroes…
Another angle came from a friend’s brother’s partner’s nephew who worked for a defence contract at Fort Halstead (not on the map but near the M25 near Otford) with computer company LOGICA.
The village we were approaching was Halstead, ribbon-development filling a fork in the road. Why should such a place, where you might meet a traffic cop having a tea break, boast of a substantial ‘Police Office’? And nothing else: beyond ‘Church, remains of’, Old Rectory and pub.
Politically sensitive forensic investigations, Renchi had heard. Fragments ba
gged when the bombers hit the City or Docklands. Badger’s Mount to Fort Halstead: the story of the motorway circuit, of England. His instinct about this site was confirmed by the presence of sanctioned woodland (the sort that reminds me of Alfred Hitchcock, sylvan backdrops hovering at the margin of disbelief). Here, once again, was that Epping Forest mix: trails for the disadvantaged, bird cards – and bunkers where the police gun down cut-out terrorists. Check in at the hut, pick up a leaflet: Orchid Walk, Owl Walk, Lizard Walk. (‘The Lizard walk is also available in a large printed booklet for the visually impaired.’) Obey the rules: ‘Continue through the kissing gate, here the woods open up to shrub land. Turn a quarter right towards the bottom of the valley and continue up the other side to a concrete stile.’
Ecology and secrecy. Fort Halstead is a green fort. Tony Sangwine, the motorway horticulturalist, began with the MOD. First, a protective curtain of greenery. Then creative planting to improve the quality of life for the mole people, the Official Secrets mob. Whoever laid out Fort Halstead did a good job. Scrub, thorn and thicket at the rim, then tall trees and low buildings (after the fashion of the Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham Abbey). You don’t see the barbed wire and the swivelling CCTV cameras – until you make the initial penetration, until it’s too late.
An off-road vehicle with official markings tracks us, all the way from the roundabout, keeping its distance. There is only one entrance to the Fort. A long driveway, screened on both sides, leading to a set of gates. The police vehicle parks itself by the gates. No challenge, nothing said. I’m not taking out my Sony DV. I’m not risking an out-of-focus snap. A quick Palmer doodle from Renchi would summon a snatch squad. It’s all for our own good, of course. To preserve democracy and the free world. If we’ve learnt anything on our tramp, it’s this: Blake was right. Energy can only be understood as a system of contraries, polarities, oppositions: Fort Halstead mirrored, across the M25, by Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham. Palmer at Underriver working in pen and ink to counter Churchill’s splashy Chartwell oils. The world is kept in balance, the wheel spins. Blake was wise enough to journey in his imagination: ‘over trembling Thames to Shooters’ Hill and thence to Blackheath, the dark Woof. Fort Halstead, surrounded by orchids and lizards and owls, was the kennel of that Woof.
7
After Shoreham, going north, the fields are damp, footpaths puddled. Patterns of mud combed by tyre tracks. Crisscrossing lines: a desert seen from space. Flinty ground between diminishing avenues of herbs. A low, featureless sky. Everything drips and drags. We have to pull our boots from the suck of clay.
Marc and Kevin, allied by height, by philosophies of the camera, drift back: in conversation. Equestrian tackle is hung, drying, from metal gates. Horse-heads nudge over fences. Not a day for riding.
The approved walk is an illustrated book, better read than experienced. The post-Shoreham landscape is Italian, predicated on an assumption of sunlight. Lulhngstone, tight to the A225, has its castle, lake and Roman villa. Therefore: kids. Teachers, buses.
The villa is kept, for its own protection, inside a shed. ‘Is this a post office?’ one of the children asks. Ghost voices inside the hangar come from audio commentaries. Curators enjoy their Gladiator moment. The river path colludes; farm, fertile valley – with no visible obstruction to contradict the mood, no unsightly industry.
Wildlife display panels are trailers for shy birds who dip and flutter and disappear. Willow and alder and dark oak guide us through Lullingstone Park (golf and deer). We are experiencing hop country from which the hoppers have been banished (the last London hop trains stopped in 1960). Now hopping is mechanical.
Red brick memory-mansions. The gatehouse of Lullingstone Castle has its Union flag (just like a Barratt estate). A taller standard is topped with a model Spitfire. House and grounds are open to the public (FINAL SEASON!). The parish church of St Botolph’s, within the castle grounds, boasts of its noble dead, the landowners: the Peche and Hart Dyke families (with their Tudor pedigrees).
By the village of Eynsford – approaching the mysteries of Junction 3, the Swanley Interchange – walkers are in denial: there is no M25. We are outside the circuit, playing at a Kentish country ramble. Looking for kingfishers, appreciating fields where grain and vegetables were produced for export to Derenti Vadum (aka Dartford), Durobrivae (Rochester), Londinium. Nothing happened between the Romans and the Tudors, between Samuel Palmer and Pop Larkin. No TV explainer has appeared with a convincing narrative.
South London villains, economic immigrants (of the better sort), like the pedigree: the bleach and polish of these hamlets. The history. The elbow-room. The motorway at the bottom of the lane. Houses can be any colour you fancy – so long as they’re white (black beams permitted on pubs). My golfing umbrella, the only gaudy splash in the landscape, comes into its own. The road at the ford is flooded to the depth of about a foot (according to the measure by the bridge).
Long-horned cattle mope and steam (Landseer-fashion) by the river’s threatened banks. The water is rising, the Darent spreading itself – with the ambition of becoming a small lake. On the gates of ‘Meadow View’ cattle are cloned in wrought iron, all pelt and no legs. Like Scottish comedians who have run out of patter. And taken to Bud Flanagan overcoats. Another high risk property, Bridge House, features a Notre-Dame gargoyle among the hanging baskets; a horned demon on an Ionic column. Two more devils grin from the lintel of the door. Welcome to Eynsford, twinned with Rennes-le-Château.
Atkins is hooded and in dark glasses. As is Moose Jackson. I legitimise them with a flash-photograph. Moose has the cultural reference at his finger tips: Chris Marker’s La jetée. Future dead masked against the horror of the past. Against documentary evidence of bent fictions.
The church of St Martin runs with the theme of heads: detached and poking out of walls. As if these gargoyles, shrunken saints, were abandoning Christianity and reverting to paganism. Eynsford, according to Arthur Mee, has claim to ‘a straight mile unique on the map of rural England, beginning with the site of a Roman house, passing a Norman castle, and ending at the site of a Saxon settlement’. Fifteen chill faces peek from the plaster, measuring their mile, the lost alignments. Green Men, May Queens. The energy is in the stone, the natives can’t compete. They do their best, medieval carvings brought to life (with some reluctance). They move slowly, in case their limbs should crumble into dust. They stare.
We tramp, gratefully, towards the motorway (the M20). At Farningham, on the road’s edge, we discover a bookshop of such transcendent obscurity that it has slipped Driffield’s net: no listing in drif’s guide (or in the orthodox directory put out by Skoob). The now-vanished Driffield, more dedicated than Pevsner, went everywhere. The exiled German scholar was, by Drif’s reckoning, an amateur: he slept at night, sometimes for as much as three hours. Drif lay awake, lights on, radio blaring, licking his pencil and writing up the day’s report, barking at his own witticisms. He succeeded in turning himself into a brand name and then he disappeared. His books, triumphs of crazed scholarship, dedicated misinformation, sledgehammer humour, self-confessed genius, are out of print; treasured by antiquarians who don’t want their quests simplified by the Net. No other information-obsessive, so far as I know, has managed a literary form that so nearly duplicates the sound of his own voice: Drif writes at a bellow. He tub-thumps sentences, rivets puns. He moves across the landscape a little faster than the speed of light. Dosed on black coffee, he polishes his putdowns before he sets out; he’s bored by what he knows. The inertia, the snobbery, the incompetence, the petty corruptions of libricides skulking in their pits. His books are a labour of tough love, the perfect means of ensuring that he has enemies everywhere. The trade is masochistic. They wait, quaking, for the appearance of the grand inquisitor on his annual progress. They can’t bribe him with under-the-counter desiderata, or complimentary mugs of coffee swill. Lacking all scruples (and proud of it), he is incorruptible. He will pocket the bunce, but it won’t sugar his report.
Farningham and Drif were made for each other. It was a charity to step inside this shop; heaped, mounded, treble-stacked with necrotic paper. Bibliographic scrag ends. The slurry of the publishing industry. Titles so undesirable that Oxfam would have left them in a black bag on the steps of Sue Ryder. I was transfixed. The others panicked. They started, as civilians will, to pout like goldfish. To mistrust the air: they’d been landed in an alien environment.
It was a point of honour to walk out of this dump with something, anything. Courteous as a Cossack, I tipped out boxes, ransacked shelves. The best I could do was Miriam Colwell’s Young, a ‘post-Salinger, first-person narrative’ from 1955 (which I tried unsuccessfully to punt to my ageing Juvenile Delinquency collectors). ‘Intimate story of two American teenage girls… blue jeans, cokes & convertibles.’ VG in somewhat rubbed dust-jacket. Yours for a tenner. Postage included.
Renchi, as I feared, engaged the proprietor in conversation. Like all dealers, I treated this man as a necessary obstacle, a palsied hand into which to drop a few coins. Never give them an opening. The only reason the shop existed was to bring the unwary in from the street, to provide an audience for: The Story. The Ancient Mariner experience. Simon’s tale, I had to admit, was one of the best. His special needs, I assumed, were no more extreme than those you’d find in a hundred such establishments: bookdealers, even if they begin as fun-loving athletes, soon crumple into melancholia, horseshoe-spine, life-threatening obesity, shingles, myopia, incipient gangrene, flatulence. Simon had a yarn to pitch that would have subdued a crew with normal human sympathies. His image and his story travelled with us for miles. He became the messenger, the guide for that walk: dead books and a keeper waiting to talk to travellers. The oracle of Farningham.
London Orbital Page 42
