Driving back to the foot of the valley, I returned to the public house. I tried the door, only to find it locked, so I sat on the wall and watched the chalk stream filling its banks with the limited snowmelt, and cast my eye around the adjacent village green, where I was attracted to a small skein of brown wool hung from a stocky rowan, higher and darker than seemed reasonable for sheep country. When I reached it, I broke off the dry stick on which it hung, wrapped the wool carefully around the stick, and placed both in my pocket. It was then I looked at my watch and was surprised to find I had been in the valley for five hours, for it was now four pm, and dusk approaching. A terrible and irrational realisation came upon me that I had to exit the valley before dark. Shivering in panic, I returned to the car, got into the driver's seat, and turned on the heating. Keeping one eye on the pub, and the other carefully on the bridge, unwilling to let their geometry slip from me, I drove down and turned across the stream. How I had missed it before I had no idea, for there, in my rear view mirror, was the crossroad.
Much relieved, I drove out of the village and towards the edge of the Downs. By the roadside after a short distance was the church filled with Georgian items, not in the hamlet at all, but some distance away. I pulled into the small carpark to check, so long had it been. It was as before, reeking of normality. It was only on returning to the car and adjusting the mirror I noticed that my face was covered in mud. Drawing myself back to a civilised state, I drove down the road towards home, somehow nevertheless missing the old airfield. I reached the welcoming arms of my family just as the day turned to a clear crystal dusk and the last rays of the sun cast their gold and green tint across the greying mud flats.
Reflecting on this episode now, I little know how I became entangled in this oneric geography, if, indeed, entangled I was. It can be of no small doubt that it was at a time of my life which, for reasons I don't intend to divulge at this juncture, I found myself slipping between realities with alarming frequency, often unable to tell what was the originally real, and what alternatively real. Nevertheless, my recollection is sturdy on this, and my mind clear. It seems to me there are, here, the components of an entanglement which, if only arranged in the correct form, would open to reveal a grand secret, but for which the key resides elsewhere. The philosopher, the assembled members of the churchyard, the satellite dishes, the trap like nature of the valley, and my interaction with it all at such a disturbed time in my life, seem to me intimately connected; but who the entangler, and who the entangled, and in what form, I cannot tell. As it is, as I try and place the pieces in my mind, my head gets gets quite weary, and I struggle to remember more and more elements of the scene. Perhaps, in writing them down, I shall hold that day together, though I fear each time I reread this description I find myself thinking something new is missing. Nonetheless, I sit here with all I collected: the box of chalk, beech mast, mud, and rowan stick on my shelf, and ponder on that winter's day in hope; I ponder on that winter's day, and what ran through those primrosed woods between two villages, deep within the Downs.
23 Dec 2019