The Rings of Saturn

9. The Temple of Jerusalem — Charlotte Ives and the Vicomte de Chateaubriand — Memoirs from beyond the grave — In Ditchingham churchyard — Ditchingham Park — The hurricane of 16th October, 1987

After Orford, I headed inland travelling on one of the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company's red buses, going through Woodbridge to Yoxford where I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the old Roman road, into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the south of Harleston. I walked for nearly four hours, and in all that time I saw nothing apart from harvested cornfields stretching away into the distance under a sky heavy with clouds, and dark islands of trees surrounding the farmsteads which stood well back from the road, a mile or two apart from each other. I encountered hardly any vehicles while treading this seemingly unending straight, and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain. At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds. Then the rays of the sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence. It was afternoon by the time I came to the lane which leaves the Roman road across a cattle grid and leads through a meadow to Chestnut Tree Farm, an ancient moated house, where Thomas Abrams has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for a good twenty years. Now in his early sixties, Thomas Abrams has been a farmer all his life. He took to model-making soon after he left the village school, and like many of his kind he would spend the long winter evenings glueing little pieces of wood together to build all sorts of barques and sailing boats and famous ships such as the Cutty Sark and the Mary Rose. This pastime soon developed into a passion, and together with the interest he had long taken, as a Methodist lay preacher, in the factual basis of Biblical history, it gave him the idea, one evening towards the end of the Sixties, just as he was bedding the farm animals down for the night (so he told me), of recreating the Temple of Jerusalem exactly as it was at the beginning of our time. — Chestnut Tree Farm is a silent and somewhat sombrous place. Never yet, on my many visits, having come along the lane and crossed the little bridge over the moat to go up to the house, have I found anyone about. Even tapping with the heavy brass knocker brings nobody to the door. The big chestnut tree in the front yard, which must be several hundred years old, is motionless. Even the ducks on the water in the moat do not stir. If one takes a look inside through the window, it seems as if the mirror-bright dining table, the mahogany chest of drawers, the armchairs of burgundy red velvet, the hearth, and the ornaments and china figurines set out on the mantelpiece, had been drowsing there undisturbed for ever, so that one might well think that the owners have departed or died. But just as one is about to turn away, having waited and listened a while and feeling that one must have come at an inopportune moment, one sees Thomas Abrams waiting a little way off. And that is just how it was when I arrived there on foot from Yoxford on that late summer afternoon. As always, Thomas Abrams was wearing his green overalls and watchmaker's glasses. We exchanged a few words of no consequence as we walked to the barn in which the Temple was now nearing completion. Owing, however, to the size of the model, which covers nearly ten square yards, and to the minuteness and precision of the individual pieces, this process of completion is going so slowly that it is difficult to see any change from one year to the next, even though Thomas Abrams has almost given up farming, he told me, in order to be able to devote most of his time to the building of the Temple. He had just a few animals left, he said, and that more out of affection than any wish to profit from them. As I must have seen, the broad arable fields around the house had all been put back to pasture, and the standing hay was sold to one of his neighbours. It was ages since he had last driven a tractor. Hardly a day now passed that he did not work on the Temple for at least an hour or two. He had spent the past month painting about a hundred of the more than two thousand figures, no more than a quarter of an inch high, that peopled the Temple precincts. Then there are the alterations that need to be made, Thomas Abrams said, whenever my research leads to new findings. It is well known that archaeologists are divided amongst themselves as to the exact layout of the Temple; nor are my own often hard-gained insights always more reliable than the views of the squabbling scholars, even though my model is now thought to be the most accurate replica of the Temple ever produced. Thomas Abrams told me that he now received visitors from all over the world, historians from Oxford and Jehovah's Witnesses from Manchester, archaeological experts from the Holy Land, ultraorthodox Jews from London and representatives of evangelist sects from California, who had put to him the proposition that a full-size replica of the Temple should be built in the Nevada desert under his instructions. Various television companies and publishers were seeking to entice him, and Lord Rothschild had even offered to house the completed Temple in the entrance hall of his mansion near Aylesbury, and grant access to the public. The only advantage which had accrued to him personally as a result of the interest created by his work was that his neighbours, together with those members of his own family who had more or less openly expressed their doubts about whether he was of sound mind, were now a little more restrained in their disparaging comments. He could quite understand, said Thomas Abrams, how easy it was to consider someone barmy, who for so many years immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and spent his time in an unheated barn fiddling about with such an apparently never ending, meaningless and pointless project, particularly when that same person was failing to look after his fields and to collect the subsidies he was entitled to. While the opinion of his neighbours, who had become fat on the senseless Brussels agricultural policy, had never concerned him that much, the fact that it must have at times have seemed to his wife and children that he was out of his mind was something that weighed on him rather more than he admitted. And so, he said, the day that Lord Rothschild drove into my yard in his limousine was indeed an important turning point in my life, because ever since then even the family have looked on me as a scholar engaged in serious study. On the other hand, of course, the constantly growing number of visitors keeps me from my work, and the work that still remains to be done is enormous. You might well say that because of my increasingly accurate knowledge, the task now seems in every respect more difficult to complete than ten or fifteen years ago. One of the American evangelists once asked me whether the Temple was inspired by divine revelation. And when I said to him it's nothing to do with divine revelation, he was very disappointed. If it had been divine revelation, I said to him, why would I have had to make alterations as I went along? No, it's just research really and work, endless hours of work, Thomas Abrams said. You had to study the Mishnah, he continued, and every other available source, and Roman architecture, and the distinctive features of the edifices raised by Herod in Masada and Borodium, because that was the only way of arriving at the right ideas. In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch. I would more than likely never have started building the Temple if I had had any notion of how my work would get out of hand, and of the demands it would make on me as it became ever more complex. After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffes on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my field of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.

But on other days, when the evening light streams in through this window and I allow myself to be taken in by the overall view, then I see for a moment the Temple with its antechambers and the living quarters of the priesthood, the Roman garrison, the bath-houses, the market stalls, the sacrificial altars, covered walkways and the booths of the moneylenders, the great gateways and staircases, the forecourts and outer provinces and the mountains in the background, as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity. In closing, Thomas Abrams dug out a magazine from under a pile of papers and showed me a double-page aerial view of the Temple precinct as it is today: white stones, dark cypresses, and in the centre, the golden Dome of the Rock, which immediately brought to mind the dome of the new Sizewell reactor, which can be seen on moonlit nights shining like a shrine far across the land and sea. The Temple, Thomas Abrams said as we left his workshop, endured for only a hundred years. Perhaps this one will last a little longer. On the bridge over the moat, where we lingered for a while, Thomas Abrams told me how much he liked the ducks, a couple of which were quietly paddling around in the water and snapping up the food which he now and then took out of the pocket of his overalls and threw down for them. I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind. That is how it has been for as long as I can remember. As I took my leave and mentioned that I had walked over from Yoxford and was now going on to Harleston, Thomas said that he would drive me as he had an errand in town anyway. So we spent the quarter of an hour to Harleston sitting side by side in the cab of his truck, and I wished that the short drive through the country would never come to an end, that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem. But instead I had to get out at the Saracen's Head in Harleston, an inn several centuries old whose guest rooms, as it transpired, were furnished with the most fearful pieces one can imagine. The headboard of the pink bed consisted of a black marbled formica construction nearly five feet high, with various drawers and compartments, rather like an altar; the thin-legged dressing-table was lavishly decorated with gold arabesques; and the mirror, which was fitted into the door of the wardrobe, made one look strangely deformed. As the wooden floorboards were very uneven and sloped towards the window, all the furniture stood at something of a tilt, so that I was pursued even while asleep by the feeling that the house was about to fall down. It was therefore with a certain relief that I left the Saracen's Head the following morning and walked eastward out of the town into the open fields. The stretch of land which I now traversed in a wide arc was no more densely populated than the one I journeyed through on the previous day. Every couple of miles there is a hamlet, and without exception these hamlets are named after the patron saints of their churches: St Mary and St Michael, St Peter, St James, St Andrew, St Lawrence, St John and St Cross, and as a result the people living there call the entire area The Saints. They say such things as: He bought land in The Saints, clouds are coming up over The Saints, that's somewhere out in The Saints and so on. My own feeling, as I walked over the featureless plain, was that I might well lose my bearings in The Saints, so often was I forced to change direction or strike out across country due to the labyrinthine system of footpaths and the many places where a right of way marked on the map had been ploughed up or was now overgrown. A couple of times I began to think I was lost, but then, around noon, I saw my goal, the round tower of the church of Ilketshall St Margaret, appear in the distance. Half an hour later I was sitting leaning against one of the gravestones in the cemetery of that parish, whose souls number no more today than in the Middle Ages. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parsons who were the incumbents of such remote livings usually dwelt with their families in the nearest small town and drove out into the country by pony cart just once or twice a week in order to hold services and make a few calls. One such vicar of Ilketshall St Margaret was the Reverend Ives, a mathematician and Hellenist of some standing, who lived with his wife and daughter in Bungay and was said to have liked his glass of sparkling Canary wine at dusk. During the summer of 1795 they were visited every day by a young French nobleman who had fled to England to escape the terrors of the Revolution. Ives talked with him about Homer's epics, Newton's mathematical theories, and the journeys which both of them had made in America. What great expanses that continent covered, and how immense the forests were, with trees whose trunks towered higher than the pillars of the tallest cathedrals! And the plunging waters of Niagara — what did their eternal thunder mean if there were not also someone standing at the edge of the cataract conscious of his forlornness in this world. Charlotte, the rector's fifteen-year-old daughter, would listen to these conversations with growing fascination, especially when their distinguished guest conjured up pictures in which warriors adorned with feathers appeared, and Indian maidens about whose dark skin there was a touch of moral pallor. Once she was so overcome with emotion that she ran out quickly into the garden on hearing of a hermit's good dog that led one such maiden, in her heart already a Christian, safely through the dangerous wilderness. When the teller of the tale later asked her what it was in his account that had so moved her, Charlotte answered that it was mainly the image of the dog carrying a lantern on a stick in his mouth, lighting the way through the night for the frightened Atala. It was always such little details rather than the lofty ideas that went straight to her heart. In the manner of such things, it was surely inevitable that the Viacomte, who was exiled from his homeland and undoubtedly surrounded by the aura of a romantic hero in Charlotte's eyes took on the rule of tutor and confidant as the weeks went by. Whilst it goes without saying that she practised her French, by taking dictation and engaging in conversation, Charlotte also asked her friend to devise more extensive courses of study for her, to include antiquity, the topography of the Holy Land, and Italian literature. They spent long hours in the afternoon together reading Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and the Vita Nuova, and in all likelihood there were times when the young girl's throat flushed scarlet and the Vicomte felt the thuds of his heartbeat right under his jabot. Their day always ended with a music lesson. When dusk was settling inside the house, but the light streaming in from the west still lit the garden, Charlotte would play some piece or other from her repertoire, and the Vicomte, appuyé au bout du piano, would listen to her in silence. He was aware that their studies brought them closer every day, and, convinced that he was not fit to pick up her glove, sought to conduct himself with the utmost restraint, but nonetheless remained irresistibly drawn to her. With some dismay, as he later wrote in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, I could foresee the moment at which I would be obliged to leave. The farewell dinner was a sad occasion during which no one knew what to say, and when it was over, much to the astonishment of the Vicomte, it was not the father but the father who withdrew with Charlotte to the drawing room. Although he was on the point of departure, the mother — who, the Vicomte noticed, was herself most seductive in the unusual role which she was now playing in the teeth of convention — asked his hand in marriage for her daughter, whose heart, she said, was entirely his. You no longer have a native country, your property has been disposed of, your parents are no longer alive: what could possibly take you back to France? Stay here with us and be our adopted son and heir. The Vicomte, who could scarcely believe the generosity of this offer made to an impoverished emigrant, was thrown into the greatest conceivable inner turmoil by her proposal, which it seemed the Reverend Ives had approved. For while on the one hand, he wrote, he desired nothing so much as to be able to spend the rest of his life unknown to the world in the bosom of this solitary family, on the other hand the melodramatic moment had now come when he would have to disclose the fact that he was married. While the alliance he had entered into in France had been arranged by his sisters almost without consulting him and had remained a mere formality, this did not in the slightest alter the untenable situation in which he now found himself. Mme Ives had put her offer to him with her eyes half downcast, and when he responded with the despairing cry Arrêtez! Je suis marié! she fell into a swoon, and he was left with no other choice than to leave that hospitable house at once with the resolution never to return. Later, setting down his memories of that ill-omened day, he wondered how it would have been if he had undergone the transformation and led the life of a gentleman chasseur in that remote English county. It is probable that I should never have written a single word. In due course I should have even forgotten my own language. How great would France's loss have been, he asks, if I had vanished into thin air like that? And would it not, in the end, have been a better life? Is it not wrong to squander one's chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? — The Vicomte wrote these words in 1822. He was now the ambassador of the French king at the court of George IV. One morning, when he was sitting working in his study, his valet announced that a Lady Sutton had arrived in her carriage and wished to speak to him. When this strange caller crossed the threshold, accompanied by two boys aged about sixteen who, like herself, were in mourning, he had the impression that she found it difficult to remain upright owing to some inner agitation. The Vicomte took her by the hand and led her to an armchair. The two boys stood by her side. And the lady, speaking in a quiet, broken voice as she brushed back the black silk ribbons that hung from her bonnet, said: My lord, do you remember me? And I, the Vicomte wrote, recognised her. After twenty-seven years I was sitting at her side again, the tears swelled up in my eyes, and I saw her, through the veil of those tears, exactly as she had been during that summer which had long sunk into the shades of memory. Et vous, Madame, me reconnaissez-vous? I asked her. She did not reply, however, but looked at me with such a sad smile that I realized that we had meant far more to each other than I had admitted to myself at the time. — I am in mourning for my mother, she said; my father died years ago. As she said this, she withdrew her hand and covered her face. My children, she continued after some time, are the sons of Admiral Sutton, whom I married three years after you left us. You must excuse me now. I cannot say any more today. — She took my arm, the Vicomte writes in his memoirs, and as I led her through the house, down the stairs and back to her carriage, I held her hand against my heart and could feel that she was trembling. She drove off with her two dark-haired boys sitting opposite her like two mute servants. Quel bouleversement des destinées! Over the next few days, the Vicomte writes, I visited Lady Sutton four times at the address in Kensington that she had given me. On none of these occasions were her sons at home. We talked and were silent, and with each Do you remember? our past life rose more clearly from the cruel abyss of time. On my fourth visit, Charlotte asked me to put in a good word with george Canning, who had just been made Governor-General of India, for the elder of her two sons, who planned to go to Bombay. It was solely on account of this request, she said, that she had come to london, and she must now return to Bungay. Farewell! I shall never see you again! Farewell! — After this painful parting I spent long hours shut away in my study at the embassy and, with repeated interruptions for vain reflection and brooding, committed our unhappy story to paper. As I did so, I was troubled by the question of whether in the writing I should not once again betray and lose Charlotte Ives, and this time for ever. But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! — so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful. When I walked in Hyde Park yesterday, I felt unspeakably wretched and outcast amongst the colourful crowd. As if from afar, I watched the beautiful young English women with the same bewilderment of my senses that I used to feel in an embrace. And today I do not raise my eyes from my work. I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man. Perhaps that is why it appears to me that this world which I have very nearly left behind is shrouded in some peculiar mystery.

The story of Charlotte Ives is only a minute fragment of the several thousand pages of the Vicomte de Chateaubriand's memoirs. It was in Rome in 1806 that he first felt the desire to search the depths of his soul. In 1811, Chateaubriand began this undertaking in earnest, and from that time onwards he devoted himself to his recollections whenever the circumstances of his at once glorious and painful life permitted. His personal feelings and thoughts unfolded against the background of the momentous upheavals of those years: the Revolution, the Reign of Terror, his own exile, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the Restoration and the July Monarchy all were part of this interminable play performed upon the world's stage, a play which took its toll on the privileged observer no less than on the nameless masses. The scene was constantly changing. We see the coast of Virginia from on board a ship, visit the naval arsenal in greenwich, marvel at his description of the great fire of Moscow, stroll through the parks of Bohemian spas and witness the bombardment of Thionville. Burning torches illuminate the city battlements, which are swarming with thousands of soldiers; the fiery trajectories of cannonballs criss-cross the dark air; and before each report from the guns, a dazzling glare lights up the towering clouds in the sky right up to the blue zenith. At times the noise of the battle dies down for a few seconds, and then one can hear the beating of drums, brass fanfares, and orders bellowed out by voices strained to breaking point. Sentinelles, prenez garde à vous! Within the overall context of the task of remembering, such colourful accounts of military spectacles and large-scale operations form what might be called the highlights of history which staggers blindly from one disaster to the next. The chronicler, who was present at these events and is once more recalling what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In the writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent. From the very outset, recapitulating the past can have only one end, the hour of deliverance, which in the case of Chateaubriand came on the 4th of June 1848, the day on which death took the pen from his hand in a rez-de-chaussée in the Rue du Bac. Combourg, Rennes, Brest, St Mal, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Brussels, the island of Jersey, London, Beccles and Bungay, Milan, Verona, Venice, Rome, Naples, Vienna, Berlin, Potsdam, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Basle, Ulm, Waldmünchen, Teplitz, Karlsbad, Prague and Pilsen, Bamber, Würzburg and Kaiserslautern, and time and again, Versailles, Chantilly, Fontainebleau, Rambouillet, Vichy and Paris — these were just a few of the stations along a journey which had now reached its end. At the beginning was a childhood in Combourg, the account of which became indelibly imprinted on my mind the very first time I read it. François-René was the youngest of ten children, the first four of whom lived for no more than few months. The others were christened Jean-Baptiste, Marie-Anne, Bénigne, Julie and Lucile. All four girls were of a rare beauty, especially Julie and Lucile, both of whom were to die in the turmoil of the Revolution. The Chateaubriand family lived in total seclusion, with a number of servants, in the manor house at Combourg, where the halls and passages were so vast and endless that an army of crusaders might lose their way in them. Apart from a few neighbouring noblemen such as the Marquis de Monlouet or Count Goyon-Beaufort, no one ever visited the castle. Particularly in winter, Chateaubriand writes, entire months would pass without any travellers or strangers knocking on the gate of our fortress. Far greater than the sadness that hung over the surrounding heath was the sadness that pervaded this lonely house. Those who walked beneath its vaults felt much as one might when entering a Carthusian monastery. The bell for dinner always rang at eight. After dinner, we would sit for a few hours by the fire. The wind would be moaning in the chimney, mother sighed on the sofa, and father, whom I never saw seated except at table, paced up and down the enormous dining hall until it was time for bed. He always wore a white woollen shaggy robe, and a cap of the same material. Once he was at a certain distance from the centre of the hall, which was lit only by the flickering fire in the hearth and a solitary candle, he would begin to disappear into the shadows, and, when he was completely immersed in the darkness, all one would hear was his footfall until he came back like a ghost, in his peculiar attire. During the summer months, we would sit outside on the steps in front of the house as it was getting dark. Father would fire his shotguns at owls, and we children and mother would look across at the black tree tops of the forest and up at the heavens where the stars come out one by one. At the age of seventeen, Chateaubriand writes, I left Combourg. One day my father pronounced that I would have to make my own way henceforth. He had determined that I would join the Régiment de Navarre and leave on the following day to travel to Cambrai via Rennes. Here, he said, are a hundred Louis d'or. Do not squander them and never dishonour your name. At the time of my departure he was already suffering from the progressive paralysis which was finally to send him to his grave. His left arm twitched constantly, and he had to keep it still with his right hand. And that was how, after he had given me his old rapier, he stood with me beside the cabriolet that was already waiting in the green courtyard. We drove up the lane by the fishponds, and one more time I beheld the mill stream shining and the swallows swooping across the reeds. Then I looked ahead, at the broad terrain that was now opening up in front of me.

It took another hour to walk from Ilketshall St Margaret to Bungay, and a further hour from Bungay over the marshes of the Waveney valley to the far side of Ditchingham. Visible from a distance, nestling at the foot of the ridge which drops down quite steeply to the watermeadows, was Ditchingham Lodge, the isolated house where Charlotte Ives lived for many years after her marriage to Admiral Sutton. As I approached, I could see the window panes glinting in the sunlight. A woman in a white apron — what an unusual sight, I thought — came out underneath the portico roof which was supported by two columns, calling a black dog that was running about in the garden. Apart from her there was not a soul in sight. I climbed the slope to the main road and then walked across the stubble fields to Ditchingham churchyard, some way outside the village, where the elder of Charlotte's two sons, who went to seek his fortune in Bombay, is buried. The inscription on the stone sarcophagus reads: At Rest Beneath, 3rd February 1850, Samuel Ives Sutton, Eldest Son of Rear Admiral Sutton, Late Captain 1st Battalion 60th Rifles, Major by Brevét and Staff Officer of Pentioners. Next to Samuel Sutton's grave stands another even more imposing monument, also built of slabs of heavy stone and crowned by an urn. What struck me about this tomb were the round holes on the upper edges of the four sides. They reminded me somehow of the air-holes we used to make as children in the lids of the boxes in which we kept the cockchafers we caught, with some leaves for food. It was possible, I thought to myself, that the bereaved had had these holes bored into the stone in the eventuality that the dear departed in her sepulchre should wish once more

to breathe the air. The name of the lady who had been cared for in this manner was Sarah Camell, who died on the 26th of October 1799. As the wife of the Ditchingham doctor, she would have been acquainted with the Ives family, and it is probable that Charlotte, together with her parents, was present at the funeral and perhaps even played a pavane on the pianoforte at the Camells' home after the service. The higher sentiments which were cultivated at the time in the circles in which Sarah and Charlotte moved are preserved in the elegant words of the epitaph which Dr Camell, who survived his wife by nearly forty years, had engraved on the south-facing side of the pale grey tomb:

Firm in the principles and constant

in the practice of religion

Her life displayed the peace of virtue

Her modest sense, Her unobtrusive elegance

of mind and manners,

Her sincerity and benevolence of heart

Secured esteem, conciliated affection,

Inspired confidence and diffused happiness.

Ditchingham churchyard was the very last stop on my walk through the county of Suffolk. The afternoon was already drawing to a close, and so I decided to return to the main road and continue a short way in the direction of Norwich, to the Mermaid in Hedenham, where the bar would be opening soon. I would be able to phone home from there to be picked up. The route I had to take led me past Ditchingham Hall, a house built around 1700 in beautiful mauve-coloured brick, the windows of which are fitted with dark green shutters. It was situated well off the main road above a serpentine lake, and encompassed on all sides by extensive parkland. Later, while I was waiting for Clara in the Mermaid, it occurred to me that Ditchingham Park must have been laid out around the time when Chateaubriand was in Suffolk. Estates of this kind, which enabled the ruling elite to imagine themselves surrounded by boundless lands where nothing offended the eye, did not become fashionable until the second half of the eighteenth century. Planning and executing the work necessary for an embarkment could take two or three decades. In order to complete such a project it was usually necessary to buy parcels of land and add them to the existing estate, and roads, tracks, individual farmsteads, sometimes even entire villages had to be moved, as the object was to enjoy an uninterrupted view from the house over a natural expanse innocent of any human presence. It was for the same reason that fences were replaced with broad, grass-covered ha-has, which were dug out at a cost of many thousands of working hours. Naturally, such an undertaking, with its considerable impact not only on the landscape, but also on the life of the local communities, could not always be accomplished without controversy. At the period in question, an ancestor of Earl Ferrers, the present owner of Ditchingham Hall, having become embroiled in a confrontation with one of his estate managers, dispatched him with his gun, for which deed he was in due course sentenced to death by his peers in the House of Lords, and hanged publicly in London by a silken rope. — The least costly aspect of laying out a landscaped park was planting trees as specimens or in small groups, even if it was not seldom preceded by the felling of tracts of woodland and the burning-off of unsightly thickets and scrub that did not comply with the overall concept. Nowadays, given that only a third of the trees planted at the time are still standing in most parks, and that more are dying each year of old age and many other causes, we will soon be able to envisage once more the Torricelli-like emptiness in which the great country seats stood in the late eighteenth century. Chateaubriand also later made a modest attempt to realize the ideal of nature projected into that emptiness. When he returned in 1807 from his long journey to Constantinople and Jerusalem, he bought a summer house that lay hidden among wooded hills in the Vallée aux Loups, not far from the town of Aulnay. It is there that he begins to write his memoirs, on the first pages of which he speaks of the trees he has planted and tended with his own hands. Now, he says, they are still so small that I provide them with shade whenever I step between them and the sun. But one day, when they have grown, they will give shade to me, and look after me in my old age much as I looked after them in their youth. I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them. — This picture was taken at

Ditchingham about ten years ago, on a Saturday afternoon when the manor house was open to the public in aid of charity. The Lebanese cedar which I am leaning against, unaware still of the woeful events that were to come, is one of the trees that were planted when the park was laid out, and most of which, as I have said, have already disappeared. Since the mid-Seventies there has been an ever more rapid decline in the numbers of trees, with heavy losses, above all amongst the species most common in England. Indeed, one tree has become well nigh extinct: Dutch elm disease spread from the south coast into Norfolk around 1975, and within the space of just two or three summers there were no elms left alive in the vicinity. The six elm trees which had shaded the pond in our garden withered away in June 1978, just a few weeks after they unfolded their marvellous light green foliage for the last time. The virus spread through the root systems of entire avenues with unbelievable speed, causing capillaries to tighten and leading to the trees' dying of thirst. Even solitary trees were located with infallible accuracy by the airborne beetles which spread the disease. One of the most perfect trees I have ever seen was an almost two hundred-year-old elm that stood on its own in a field not far from our house. About one hundred feet tall, it filled an immense space. I recall that, after most of the elms in the area had succumbed, its countless, somewhat asymmetrical, finely serrated leaves would sway in the breeze as if the scourge which had obliterated its entire kind would pass it by without a trace; and I also recall that a bare fortnight later all these apparently invincible leaves were brown and curled up, and dust before the autumn came. It was then also that I noticed that the crowns of ash trees were becoming sparse, and the foliage of oaks was thinning and displaying strange mutations. At the same time, the trees themselves were producing leaves from hard old wood, and by mid-summer they were dropping masses of rock-hard, deformed acorns that were covered with a sticky substance. The beech trees, which until then had remained in good shape, were affected by several long droughts. The leaves were only half their usual size, and almost all the beechnuts were empty. One after the other, the poplars on the meadow died. Some of the dead

trunks are still standing, while others lie broken and bleached in the grass. Finally, in the autumn of 1987, a hurricane such as no one had ever experienced before passed over the land. According to official estimates over fourteen million mature hard-leaf trees fell victim to it, not to mention the damage to conifer plantations and bushes. That was on the night of the 16th of October. Without warning, the storm came up out of the Bay of Biscay, moved along the French west coast, crossed the English Channel and swept over the south-east part of the island out into the North Sea. I woke at about three in the morning, less as a result of the thunderous roar than because of the curious warmth and the increasing air pressure in my bedroom. In contrast with other equinoctial gales which I have experienced here, this one came not in driving gusts but with an unrelenting and, it seemed, ever more powerful force. I stood at the window and looked through the glass, which was strained almost to breaking point, down towards the end of the garden, where the crowns of the large trees in the neighbouring bishop's park were bent and streaming like aquatic plants in a deep current. White clouds raced across in the darkness, and again and again the sky was lit up by a terrible flickering which, I later discovered, was caused by power lines touching each other. At some point I must have turned away for a while. At all events, I still remember that I did not believe my eyes when I looked out again and saw that where the currents of air had shortly beforehand been pouring through the black mass of trees, there was now just the paleness of the empty horizon. It seemed as if someone had pulled a curtain to one side to reveal a formless scene that bordered upon the underworld. And at the very moment that I registered the unaccustomed brightness of the night over the park, I knew that everything down there had been destroyed. And yet I hoped that the ghastly emptiness could be explained by some other means, for in the mounting din of the storm I had heard none of the crashing sounds that go with the felling of timber. It was not until later that I realized that the trees, held to the last by their root systems, toppled only gradually, and because they were forced down so slowly their crowns, which were entangled with each other, did not shatter but remained virtually undamaged. In this way, entire tracts of woodland were pressed down flat as if they had been cornfields. In the first light of dawn, when the storm had begun to abate, I ventured out into the garden. For a long time I stood choked with emotion amidst the devastation. It was like being in a kind of wind tunnel, so strong was the suction created by the onrushing air, which was far too warm for the time of year. The ancient trees on either side of the path leading along the edge of the park were all lying on the ground as if in a swoon, and beneath the huge oaks, ash and plane trees, beeches and limes lay the torn and mangled shrubs that had grown in their shade, thujas and yews, hazel and laurel bushes, holly and rhododendrons. With pulsating radiance the sun rose over the horizon. The gusts continued for a while, and then it was suddenly quiet. Nothing moved, apart from the birds which had lived in the bushes and trees and which were now flitting about amongst the branches that had remained green well into the autumn that year. I do not know how I got through the first day after the storm, but do recall that during the night, doubting what I had seen with my own eyes, I walked once more through the park. As there were power cuts throughout the whole region, everything was in deep darkness. There was no glare from streetlights or houses to dull the sky. But the stars had come out, in a display so resplendent as I had seen only over the Alps when I was a child, or over the desert in my dreams. From the extreme north right down to the south where the view had before been blocked by trees, the sparkling constellations were spread out, the Plough, the tail of Draco, the triangle of Taurus, the Pleiades, Pegasus, the Swan and the Dolphin. Unchanged and, as it seemed to me, more magnificent than ever before, they revolved above me. The silence of that brilliant night after the storm was followed by the revving of chainsaws during the winter months. It took four or five labourers until March to cut up the branches, burn the rubbish, and haul away the trunks. An excavator dug large holes in which stumps and roots, some of them the size of a small house, were buried. Now, in the truest sense of the word, everything was turned upside down. The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had laid in the depths for goodness knew how long. The rays of the sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain. Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.