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By Root 1983 0

the broom was shining gold and the seakale was covered with spherical seeds, turning from pale green to bone. Dungeness is bleak and rich, the longest shingle stretch in the world, swept by winds from the sea, westerlies and easterlies. It is inhabited—boats are drawn up on the pinkish bleached pebble banks, and there are strange, soot-black wooden huts, in which fishermen live, and round which lobster pots, anchors, broken oars, nets, accumulate. You walk out, over the stony surface, which is in fact full of strange life, plants and creatures, which prosper and suffer in extremes of weather. At the end of the promontory pebbles are banked high above a shingle beach which is constantly sucked back into the dark wake, churned and thrown up elsewhere. Between the pebbles, ochre-pink, seakales sprout with fantastic fringes of frills or leaves that are purple or rich green or blue-green. Philip saw viper’s bugloss, spiky blue and sinister (maybe only because of its name) which he knew from meadows in Staffordshire, but which here seemed bluer and livelier. He saw cotton lavender, and scarlet poppies and clumps of pink valerian. All this was both bright and provisional: in winter it all disappeared as though it had never been.

Philip walked almost ceremoniously along the shingle towards the bank of pebbles at the edge of the land. The first time he came—he came many times—he was eager to reach the water edge, and only took in the human clutter and the tenacious vegetables with sidelong glances. He met no one. It was his adventure, and felt like his place. When he came to the end, he scrambled up the bank with the pebbles rattling and rushing below him, pulling him down with them, so that he went up slowly and with effort. There was the sea, to be seen from the unstable summit. He stood under a sunny sky and saw that it was dark and deep, with patches of wind, and contrary currents, pulling this way and that, and the waves coming in, and in, and shifting and grinding the stones. He thought it would be good to see it in a storm, if he could stand up. He was at the edge of England. He thought about edges, and limits, and he thought about Palissy, studying salt water, and fresh water, springs and runnels on the earth. He hadn’t ever considered the fact that the earth was round, that he stood on the curved surface of a ball. Here seeing the horizon, feeling the precariousness of his standpoint, he suddenly had a vision of the thing—a huge ball, flying, and covered mostly with this water endlessly in motion, but held to the surface as it hurtled through the atmosphere, and in its dark depths, blue, green, brown, black, it covered other colder earth, and sand and stone, to which the light never reached, where perhaps things lived in the dark and plunged and ate each other, he didn’t know, maybe no one knew. The round earth, with hills and valleys of earth, under the liquid surface. It was pleasant, and frightening, to be alive in the sun.

He sat down on the pebbles, which were warm, and ate the bread and cheese and apple he had brought. He thought he must take a stone back with him. It is an ancient instinct to take a stone from a stony place, to look at it, to give it a form and a life that connect the human being to the mass of inhuman stones. He kept picking them up, and discarding them, charmed by a dark stain, or a vein that glittered, or a hole bored through. He held them, and looked at them, put them down and lost them, gathered up others. The one he finally chose—almost irritably by now, feeling anxious about the huge accumulated bank of rejects—was egg-shaped, with white lines on it, and narrow little bore-holes that didn’t come all the way through. Hiding places for tiny creatures, sand-spiders or hair-thin worms.

He spent time drawing things—the leaves of the seakale, a ghostly crab-shell, a piece of bleached driftwood, just for the pleasure of looking and learning. Now and then he looked furtively at the water, to see if it had changed—it always had. He felt changed, but there was no one to tell.

He returned often,