My Time in Space Page 2
Pining for horizons, I used to walk through London so far as possible as if I were in open countryside. The site of my ‘University of the Woods’ could have been Hampstead Heath, but was in fact, or in imagination at any rate, a scruffy bit of parkland by the Welsh Harp reservoir, beyond Cricklewood and Neasden – beyond, that is, from the point of view of West Hampstead, my village when that piece of fiction was written – across which I used to ramble, until the body of a youngster from a delinquent family we knew of was dug up there, and it no longer seemed a safe landfall from the sea of chaos growling all around it. From that (quite properly) modest eminence one sees the Greater London of dingy towerblocks, cardboard-box industrial units and turbid rivers of traffic, with enough aircraft overhead to define a loose skein of flight-paths hanging above and declining into it at various grey points of the compass. Some notes have surfaced, of my first expeditions there:
19/5/72 I saw across the Kilburn valley (Watling St.) the spire of another church – from there one could look back and see the spire of the Priory Rd. church. Walking along Willesden Lane, ‘I’ll walk as far as the next village and then get the bus back.’ And it is a village. In the dental lab window: ‘Why not get an 18 or 22 carat gold tooth fitted to your dentures?’ Front doors with names and numbers stacked against the wall in the scrap metal yard; mercury 14s. a lb. today. Mr Whisker next to the pet shop. Metropolis, a magnificent green and red perspex service station.
I asked somebody ‘What’s that big building on the horizon?’ He stared along the sideroad. His first horizon in London? ‘Maybe one of those factories on the North Circular.’ Later I found it is the GPO Research Centre. The parkkeeper in Gladstone Park identified Wembley Stadium for me; ‘Cup Finals, we hear the roar.’
Beyond that, another valley, then up Dollis Hill. Dodging around to see the Adelaide Rd. towerblocks between the trees of Gladstone Park. Navigating by the sun through slow curves of semi-detached houses towards Willesden Green. A brilliant shortcut along Charlesworth Rd. Places you can see across London: from railway bridges, along the lines.
6/6/72 Drizzle and semis to Gladstone Park, and a steep hill to the GPO Research Centre, but from there a great vista down and across the Welsh Harp (at last!). From the North Circular Road see church and rounded treetops of a clearly defined village on the other shore beyond the masts of sailing boats. On the south shore, along Blackbird Hill to Neasden. Long detour to get down to the northern shore. Little woods. A squeaking and rustling; waited, saw a little shrew (W.H. Hudson writes about this in A Shepherd’s Life). Further on in the fields watched a pair of kestrels divebombing a crows’ nest. The crows frightened, silent, crouching on the nest. One flew off across the fields and was almost beaten to the ground by the hawk swooping on it. Ambiguous end; did both crows leave the nest? The other kestrel sat in the field for a long time. A robin perched a yard or two from me as I watched all this; thin wistful song, a lonely bird.
18/6/72 Went back to see if in fact it was the crows which were robbing the kestrels’ nest. Bus to Hendon Broadway; the sight of the lake is nearly as romantic as the inn-sign of it there, ‘The Old Welsh Harp’. Squally day, grey and silver. Coots and ducks on the waves. Watched the nest for a long time, sheltered under an elm from the rain. A hawk came into the tree briefly; the only crows were a little group in the field 200 yards away. So it was the hawks nesting in an old crows’ nest. The kestrels hovering and gliding across to the far side of the lake – and beyond them the regular sloping down of airliners towards Heathrow, quite silent at that distance, two visible at any time. A march-tit by the lake and yellow flags. An hour there, and no-one passed! Past the sailing clubs to Blackbird Hill, walked up it but couldn’t get much sense of the land beyond. Bus back to Willesden Garage, took the wrong turning coming out of a little bookshop and got spectacularly lost. Arrived at the Harrow Road! and walked back to Willesden Lane by endless slow-curved avenues. It was the bus-ride that broke my contact with the land’s directions.
But in the modern city’s layout ‘the land’s directions’ have been overridden by the impetus of transport; it is perverse to identify oneself with the losing side, the buried past, in this historical agon. My 1960s artistic projects for bringing into consciousness London’s suppressed geography – for instance, a walk along the course of the long-built-over Kilburn, the Kyle Burn of lost rural ways, leaving a bunch of watercress on the doorstep of each police station I passed – could be seen not only as whimsical but as life-denying. The city builds, tears down, rebuilds, its own horizons; its skylines burgeon and decay like the close-packed petals of a rose. For the truly London pastime of identifying from half-obscured profiles buildings with names and histories, Primrose Hill, on the verge of the inner city, is the place. I forget what exactly is underfoot at the highest point of that shallow dome of trim grass and treed walks, but it is worn down into hardness or concreted or tarmacked, as if the constant directing of attention away from it to the vistas below has somehow annulled it. I used to call it ‘The Point of View’ and identified it with the site of the foot of Jacob’s ladder, and indeed it did occasionally reveal a visionary dimension to the city. One evening M and I were strolling on the slopes of the hill when we met a poet of our acquaintance coming down. He said, ‘There’s a lot of people up there; they must be expecting an event,’ and went on his way hunched in introspection. We hurried up to join the gathering on the Point of View. Nothing was happening but the evening itself; the event was London’s bewitchment by the level rays of sunset, its transformation into a poet’s city, Samarkand, Xanadu.
Lines of Latitude
Flying across the Great Plains, say from New Orleans to Denver, one looks down at a flatland divided precisely into squares, most of them further divided into four. Many of these smaller lots contain a huge circle, the extent of a crop irrigated by sprays on a centrally pivoted, slowly rotating beam; anyone seeing these discs for the first time will think, as I did, of a giant game of draughts played on an endless board. Underlying and half-effaced by this modern, rectilinear, rule-bound geography is another, vague, senescent, of sprawling elevations that look too slight to be captured in contours, and meandering streambeds abandoned to stagnancy and evaporation. If nature seems to be wandering at a loss in a directionless expanse, the work of humans knows the cardinal points of the compass exactly, and the roads that follow and define the boundaries of lots are singlemindedly intent on getting out of here, wherever ‘here’ is, as directly as possible. As the shadow of the plane advances over it for hour after hour, the agricultural geometry at last begins to lose conviction, the succession of squares wears out, a subdued chaos of desert shows through. Eventually only a few highways persist in their monomaniac westward career towards the Rockies.
Westward is the warp-direction, the underlying and sustaining drive of ruthless purpose, in this awe-inspiring tapestry of the advance of the frontiers of cultivation. A thousand miles of Euclid might also appear to be a convincing demonstration of the flatness of the Earth, the potentially limitless extent of human domination, but on reflection the grand theorem of the Plains proves just the opposite. While Manifest Destiny is obviously responsible for the general westwards trend of this landscape, why is it in fact orientated so precisely east-west? Could it not have run towards the west-north-west, for example, or in whatever other direction historical contingencies might have aimed it initially? In laying out such a uniform schema, the ideal would be for at least one set of boundaries to be straight and parallel, i.e. to maintain a constant compass-bearing and a constant lateral separation. But a line that intersects the meridians at any fixed angle other than ninety degrees will wind around the globe and if prolonged will eventually spiral in towards one of the Poles; therefore another line starting at a given separation from it and following the same compass-course will ultimately converge with it, and the strip of land between them will taper to nothing. On a continental scale, the only way to avoid the convergence of loxodromes, as such lines of cons
tant bearing are called, is to have them running exactly east-west. Thus the claim of human sovereignty over the land, so aggressively asserted by this whole vast system of subdivision, is subverted by its prime parameter, forced into a covert assent to the curvature of the Earth and the finitude of our dominion.
From similar causes arise the complexes of feelings we invest in elements of the scaffolding of latitude and longitude: the Poles, the Meridian of Greenwich, the Equator, the Arctic and Antarctic Circles; these (always capitalized) intangibles combine totalitarian presumption with a due recognition of littleness. I have no experience of the Equator, and wonder at the demeaning horseplay associated with the crossing of it; but I have paid my respects to the Arctic Circle, the latitude at which on midsummer’s eve the sun’s apparent course is a circle that just touches the horizon, or would, in a perfectly spherical world of ideal horizons.
It was a Sunday; after many hours standing by the empty road to the deep north of Norway, I was offered a lift by a young would-be playboy in an open sportscar, driving to nowhere in particular because of what he described as ‘the small opportunities’ of the little town he was employed in. He was delighted to take me as far as I wanted to go, and it was an exciting ride, breezing through sunshine and empty moorlands towards that abstract line stretched taut around the curve of the globe, which I could feel ahead of me like the tape at the finish of a footrace. When we saw pretty blonde girls picnicking we shrieked to a halt, and then, as they ignored us, roared off again. Eventually a small sign announced the Arctic Circle. We stopped where a few cars were parked outside a little souvenir shop, stretched ourselves in the sunshine, jumped across the line drawn on the road, and poked about among dwarf willow and reindeer moss for a while, in a wide barrenness that lifted snowy wings to the blue sky on either side.
My driver turned back from there, and I pressed on, determined to see the midnight sun from the best possible vantage point on the upcoming midsummer’s eve. By stages and small adventures I came to a little port, and took a ferry to the Lofoten Islands. The sea was like black glass; the boat drew a lace curtain across it. The land of snowy peaks we were leaving, pale against a pale sky, followed us as wavering columns in the huge fan of the bow-wave. Silently another wall of rock approached, and opened a little to let us into a landlocked bay. A small town there was spread like fingers between immediate crags, and faced east. I determined to cross to the island’s north-Atlantic outlook, and out of a certain obstinacy persisted in doing this by hitchhiking. I remember waiting a long time and with growing alarm to be lifted out of a desolation among needle-sharp peaks, where viciously screeching terns zipped to and fro over the surface of a fjord; I wondered if the fish were aware of these flying knives and forks above their two-way mirror ceiling. It was late in the evening when I was dropped off in a run-down fishing village. The family who had brought me on the last stage had evident misgivings about leaving me there.
Nobody was visible in the street, so I began knocking on doors, and after several enquiries learned that none of the houses kept visitors. The sun was still high and I could have slept out, but a bank of fog moving into the bay like a huge battleship looked ominous, and I was relieved when another door opened and a cheery old salt came out to survey me. We had no common language, but my needs were obvious, and without a word he stuck his pipe in his mouth, put me into a car and drove me down to the waterfront, and then beyond it. I already had a fine sense of arrival, of having gone as far as possible to greet the midnight sun from the edge of the inhabited world, but now I was amazed to find myself crossing a long rough causeway to an islet even nearer that ideal horizon. It was scarcely more than a large rock with a couple of gaunt sheds, in one of which was a room perched over the water’s edge and reached by a ladder. The room was quite bare and smelled strongly of fish, but there were bunks, and two little windows looking at the sun. I had no food apart from an apple and a lump of goat’s cheese I had already dined and breakfasted off several times because the few shops and restaurants of the region had been closed by the time I reached habitation each evening and were still closed when I left in the mornings, but drinking water was to be had from a hose in the deserted fish factory close by. There my benefactor left me. A hippie couple lurking in another room of the building told me it was used during the winter by cod-fishermen, who moored their boats below and snatched a few hours’ rest from the waves in it without quite coming ashore. There was no one else on the islet. I was delighted with the extremity of my situation.
Towards midnight I wandered out among a few drifting scarves of fog. The sun, a pale disc, was gliding at a perceptible rate along the perfect skyline of a calm sea. Seabirds shrieked horribly. I looked for a memento of this mournful end of the world, but there was nothing on the rocks apart from a few bits of the sponge called Dead Man’s Fingers. In the middle of the islet stood an enormous skeletal structure of wooden beams, a hundred yards long, shaped like a nave with side-aisles. It was hung with thousands of dried codfish, whose brown and twisted corpses gaped downwards. The stench was confounding. I had hoped some ceremony would suggest itself for this moment, but could not have foreseen that it would be staged in a temple of death. As the sun rolled along the horizon, I steeled myself to walk, processionally, through the appalling gibbet-cathedral.
The next day – but it was already the next day; I had just seen two days being arc-welded into one – I recrossed the island, heading home to my love in London. The ferry to the mainland sailed at 11 p.m.; at first the sun was hidden behind the mountains of the island, but when we drew out it appeared above them in a sea of pink feathers. From a few miles away the island chain was a long wall of peaks as sharp as the beaks and claws of the hungry birds that followed us, and dark blue against the rosy sky and the huge disc of the sun. As the islands shrank back I saw for the first time in my life how large the sun really is. The islands, the whole globe, could have dwindled to a dot, and the sun would still have looked the same size. At midnight it was at the lowest point of the vast slanting circle it makes round the sky, and the circle held the earth like a pebble in the palm of a hand.
BALLISTICS
Flat in long grass, I watch the bomber coming in low over the palm trees. As its bomb doors gape open I tilt my bren gun up and fire into the dark of its belly…. Battle is the shift and crisscross of death-lines in the hand of space; one is supposed to read them, lurk in their interstices, then run between or under or magnificently overleap them, to claim a vantage and reconfigure them. However, I had no bullets in my gun to bring the plane down in flames and whoever was in it had no bomb to smear me around the walls of a crater; the episode was a practice-run, a moment in a military exercise that swept over me in a mind-splitting roar and otherwise left me for long hours to contemplate ants crawling up grass stems. But it was a thrill, even if I had to smile at myself wrestling with my bren gun, which toppled over at the crucial moment; I was invincible, a solo hero, like the man in a war film I saw once who lobbed a stick of dynamite into the path of the fighter diving to strafe him, causing the plane to disintegrate satisfactorily in a whirl of black smoke.
Ballistic space, the space imposed by weapons of death-at-a-distance, with its fields of fire, possible and actual trajectories, its terrains denied and zones of security and danger, is a playground mankind exults in. Show a male child a gun, the sociobiologists say, and he climbs back up the spiral staircase of the genes to the African savannahs, where a million generations were spent killing animals with throwing-sticks; that was the age of the world in which the qualities of manliness were born, and ours is the age in which they have entered into a suicide pact with technology.
Not so, womankind. During the war my parents were living near a target of the Luftwaffe. When sirens howled in the night and Daddy went out in his bomb-proof ARP hat, my mother used to crouch beneath a great stone slab in the larder with us two children gathered under her (it was the most dangerous place in the house, but how was she to know?) and try
to assure us that the forces thundering around us were all protective: ‘Was that one of ours, Mummy?’ we would crow whenever a bang shook the house, and she would wail, ‘Yes! That was one of ours!’
As it happened, no bombs fell in our suburb and we children never saw the ugliness of war. Some mornings we were delighted to find trees and bushes hung with ribbons of aluminium foil, the chaff dropped by German bombers to confuse radar signals. Once when we had stolen away, unknown to our parents, to dig out spent bullets from a sandpit used by the Home Guard for target practice, we stirred up a puddle with some yellowish oily stuff in it, which suddenly exploded into a delightful momentary fountain. When Flying Fortresses began to be talked of by the adults, my imagination was fired and I made many drawings of winged castles that rose in battlements rimmed by cannon. The family moved to Ilkley shortly after VJ Day, and in subsequent years one of the ways in which I came to know the Moor was as a network of routes for crossing it under sniper fire: crawling through stands of bracken, worming along little watercourses, sprinting from the shelter of one boulder to the next. At that age my zest for life required an enemy to enliven the action; the War was in the past and I had missed it.