Collections of this Kind

Entangled

In the days when my parents still lived in rural West Sussex, but I had long moved away to the gritstone dales, we used to visit each Christmas. We enjoyed the chance to lounge by their fire with a tome or three, and took secret pleasure from their endless gifts - despite our protestations to the contrary. One Christmas, not so long ago, we visited, and, as is my habit on such trips, I took the opportunity to stretch my legs between books and visit a couple of local churches I had not yet seen. It was not an easy time for me, but then, as now, I had a passion for those elusive fragments of wallpaintings found in our ancient churches, which speak to me of the balanced times, when the rude and solid rural folk still needed convincing of damnation, and ritual and joy were precariously but carefully distributed across the farming year. This year, when perhaps things in my life were at their lowest, I decided to search out a group of churches far into the Downs, scattered along a deep wooded valley running almost through from the coast to the scarp. It seemed an opportunity for new solaces, for, while I knew the entrance to the valley well, I had never sought it out. The ancient hilltop opposite had been the site of any number of novel experiences for my small group of friends, its herb-covered tumuli and birdless groves providing the canvas for nights of youthful excess safe from the gaze of adults and bright lights of the local town. Nevertheless, despite the familiarity of the villages and chalk streams on the plain at its entrance, we had never, to my recollection, bothered to walk the extra couple of miles into the valley. It little helped that our usual pathways went to the east of a large military research station, bristling with satilite dishes and extending under an old runway surrounded with such fencing as to make the westward walk to the valley just a little further than we might bother with. Nevertheless, it now seems perculiar that we never made the effort, nor had my father, on one of our many sortes into the Downs looking for Spitfire bullets and glowworms, ever taken us up the valley. There always seemed to be somewhere else more pressing, or easier, or more in focus.

So, when I finally set out for the valley it was with a certain degree of curiousity and hope. The day was cold but clear, so I threw on my coat and heading off from the estuary where I grew up. I drove up off the coastal plain and into the Downs: a world, for me, as trapped in time between the 1920s and 1950s as the Dales are between the 1850s and 1880s. The rough fields were covered with one of those thin dustings of snow that merges indistinguishably with the chalk clods of the Downland soils to shine with praeternatural limelight out against the dark loam, and the beeches, yews, and oaks carried on them a light hoar that bespoke sharp starlit nights and the unearthly cry of foxes. Within the half hour, I had reached the low bridge over a clear chalk stream that marked the edge of the valley, and I momentarily drew up by the old railings to gaze at the grass of the flooded banks gently wavering under the water's glassy surface, and peer between the long, slow moving, tendrils of waterweed, hoping to see a winter pike.

23 Dec 2019

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