The Living and the Dead in Winsford

14

Twelve degrees. Lifting mist and a south-westerly wind. The sixth of November.

A fire, a short walk towards Dulverton, breakfast, thirty pages of Bleak House. Mornings are easy. We’ve only slept in the house for four nights, but it seems as if it could have been forty. The way you live one day is the way you can live all the rest of your days — that is a recurrent thought, but I’m not sure how true it is.

A group of wild ponies came to greet us. Shaggy but friendly, they seemed to us. Muddy and wet, one might add — I’m thinking of buying a pair of Wellingtons to wear instead of my walking boots.

At about noon the sun began shining in earnest, and we went for a car ride to nowhere in particular. We drove northwards and eventually stopped in a little lay-by between Exford and Porlock. Up here the moor is just as barren and extensive as Mark Britton described it. You can see for goodness knows how many kilometres in all directions, and there isn’t a single building in sight. No sign of any human activity at all, barely even a tree: just heather, gorse and bracken. Rough grass, moss and mud. The heavens seem very close indeed in such landscapes. We followed a sort of path in a north-easterly direction — I assume it’s the wild ponies that have made it — but it seemed to peter out in places and then double back on itself. It was often too wet to walk on, and we were compelled to literally force our way through the rough heather: but Castor regarded it all as a stimulating challenge, and I noticed that his attitude was rubbing off on his missus. I felt possessed by a strange feeling of freedom, of something wild and primitive. The way you live one day. . We skirted around the most waterlogged swamps, always looking back over our shoulders to make sure we didn’t lose our bearings — always respectful guests in this barren, unspoiled countryside. You don’t need to steel yourself to act like that, the feeling simply takes possession of you, the most natural thing in the world. You feel incredibly small.

Then suddenly the sky was cloudless and bright blue. It occurred to me that simply knowing that such days are a possibility, that they are stored away in time and in our calendars, makes it possible to endure our environment in ways that I have frequently found too easy to forget. After a while we came across a large group of ponies some distance away, twenty-five or thirty of them, all grazing on a sunny slope: and I immediately imagined them standing there for ever, in exactly the same place, totally indifferent to world wars, the decline and fall of the Roman empire, and the invention of the wheel. On that sun-drenched slope in the England that was after all the cradle of the modern era.

Five or six hours from now they would be enveloped in mist and darkness, but nothing could worry them less.

As we slowly trudged back towards the car I wondered if reflections such as these were something I would have tried to put into print, if I had in fact been the writer I pretended to be. Or perhaps I should put them into print in any case? But I decided that such thoughts were irrelevant. Why add a few more straws to the rubbish heap of nature observations that. . that white men have squeezed out of their existential poverty ever since the dawn of civilization? Words, words, words, I thought, and I felt undeniably pleased and relieved over the fact that my writing is no more than a mask.

On the way home we paused in Exford to do some shopping and buy a newspaper. I had barely glanced at a newspaper since sitting with Svenska Dagbladet on the ferry between Ystad and Poland, and when we got back to Darne Lodge, after making a new fire, I lay down on the sofa with Castor curled up under my legs and read through the Independent from the first page to the last. It was more of a gesture in the direction of reality and civilization as such, I think, and I found nothing that concerned me in any way, or induced me to take any interest in the outside world. I eventually fell asleep, of course, and when I woke up it was dark in the room and the fire was reduced to a barely glowing heap of embers.

I lit two candles on the table, lay on the sofa again and meditated. Listened to the whispering sounds of the rhododendron branches rubbing against the windowsill, and to the wind. It was beginning to blow quite strongly. There are no curtains in the living room. If a person or an animal were standing two metres outside the house and peering in, I wouldn’t detect it. I got up and added torch to my shopping list. According to Mr Tawkings’s inventory tucked away in its folder, there are supposed to be two torches in the house: but I haven’t discovered either of them.

Having got thus far on this unremarkable November day, I decided to take my first look at Martin’s material from Samos and Morocco.