• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2124 0

the Great Stour river at a place called Ripper’s Cross. The Weald was made of intractable, heavy clay, and was still covered with a mixture of ancient oak woods and gnarled copses of ash and thorn. He had walked most of it, over the years. Indeed all he had ever done with his life was walk about in this ancient bit of England. The Pilgrim’s Way and the bogs reminded him of Bunyan, and the Slough of Despond. He had read that over and over, as a little boy, maybe once every two weeks, living the walking to heaven, not understanding a word of the theology. Walking over this earth was like being in an English story. He had read Puck of Pook’s Hill, which Mr. Kipling had sent with an admiring note to Olive. He had read the Dymchurch Flit, where all the Pharisees, the People of the Hills, streamed over the midnight beach to leave the country which no longer believed in them. He knew—it was the kind of thing he troubled himself to know—that Purchase House was not a religious reference to the redemption of sinners, but an old word for a meeting-place of pucceles, little Pucks. Or maybe, he thought, it was both, the English language works like that. It mixes things up. He was on a kind of pilgrimage through English mud, and English chalk, and ancient English woods.

He didn’t quite ask himself to where. He took signposts to places whose names he liked. He did now have in his head an image of a story. Not more than the skeleton of a story, a walker walking through England. The odd thing was, that he saw it (he always saw stories in his head) only in shades of cream, and white, and silver, a bleached, leached, blanched story, the colour of the skeletons of seaweeds, or indeed, of humans and beasts.

Hoad Wood, Bethersden, Pot Kiln, Further Quarter, Middle Quarter, Arcadia, Bugglesden, Children’s Farm, Knock Farm, Cherry Garden, Maiden Wood, Great Heron Wood, and then, suddenly, he was faced with a line of water he recognised was the Royal Military Canal, built to add to England’s defences against invasion by Napoleon. He was quite suddenly on the edge of the Walland Marsh. The canal ran East-West, inside deep banks. There were dragonflies, and long fat frogs. He walked east along it, crossing it and turning south on a road that ran to Peartree Farm, passing Newchard, down to Rookelands, Blackman-stone, past St. Mary in the Marsh, and on to Old Honeychild. He was now in the marsh proper, criss-crossed by waterways. South-east of Honeychild he crossed the New Sewer. He went between Old Romney and New Romney, over earth that had been steadily thrown in by the workings of the sea, and made habitable for sheep by the digging of dykes. Galdesott, Kemps Hill, Birdskitchen. He skirted Lydd and the military camp with its rifle ranges and ordnance targets, set up on the bleak pebbled forelands. He found a way out of Lydd, across the Denge Marsh, past a place called Boulderwall. The surface of the earth was huge, flat, ripples and ridges of pebbled shingle, with strips of grey-green lichen clinging to the sides protected from the wind. He went across the shingle of the Denge Marsh, between the black wooden huts, the rusty boat machinery, the upturned, beached, fishing boats. He went past the Halfway Bush and the Open Pits, on which seabirds floated and called. He went on, out to the point of Dungeness, beyond the place where the single-track railway line simply ended in pebbles, below the coastguard’s hut.

You have to think about walking on pebbles. Every time you put your feet down, the pebbles impress themselves, hard and recalcitrant, through the soles of your shoes. They slide treacherously in front of you, to your side, you bow and recover yourself, you lean your body forward into the wind, which is usually fierce onto the shore, which takes your hair back over your head, which goes in and through the spiralling channels of your ears, feeling for your brain. Tom liked the pebbles. They were fragments of huge boulders from the cliffs at the edge of England, boulders which had been soft chalk and hard flint, and were now rounded by the water