The Rings of Saturn

8. A conversation about sugar — Boulge Park — The FitzGeralds — The Bredfield nursery — Edward FitzGerald's literary ventures — A Magic Shadow-Show — Loss of a friend — Year's end — Last journey, summer landscape, tears of happiness — A game of dominoes — An Irish memory — On the history of the civil war — Arson, impoverishment and decline — Catherine of Siena — The entrepreneurial spirit and the cult of the pheasant — Through the desert — Secret weapons of destruction — In another country

The day after my visit to Middleton I fell into conversation with a Dutchman named Cornelis de Jong in the bar of the Crown Hotel in Southwold. He had been to Suffolk on a number of occasions and was now thinking of buying one of the vast properties, often running to more than a thousand hectares, that are regularly offered by estate agents hereabouts. De Jong told me that he had grown up on a sugar plantation near Surabaya and later, after studying at the Wageningen Agricultural College, continued the family tradition in a somewhat straitened fashion as a sugar-beet farmer in the Deventer area. If he was now planning to transfer his interests to England, it was primarily for economic reasons, said de Jong. Single estates of the size regularly appearing on the East Anglian market never came up for sale in Holland, and manor houses of the kind that were practically thrown in for nothing with the land here were not to be found at home either. In their heyday, said de Jong, the Dutch invested chiefly in cities, while the English put their money into country estates. That evening in the bar, we talked till last orders were called about the rise and decline of the two nations and about the curiously close relationship that existed, until well into the twentieth century, between the history of sugar and the history of art. For long periods of time there was little scope for an ostentatious display of accumulated wealth, and consequently the enormous profits that accrued to the few families who grew and traded in sugar cane were largely lavished on the building, furnishing and maintenance of magnificent country residences and stately town houses. It was Cornelis de Jong who drew my attention to the fact that many important museums, such as the Mauritshuis in The Hague or the Tate Gallery in London, were originally endowed by the sugar dynasties or were in some other way connected with the sugar trade. The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said de Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew. One of the most tried and tested ways of legitimizing this kind of money has always been patronage of the arts, the purchase and exhibiting of paintings and sculptures, a practice which today, said de Jong, was leading to a relentless escalation of prices paid at major auctions. Within a few years, the hundred million mark for half a square yard of painted canvas will have been passed. At times it seems to me, said de Jong, as if all works of art were coated with a sugar glaze or indeed made completely of sugar, like the model of the battle of Esztergom created by a confectioner to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia, so it is said, devoured in one of her recurrent bouts of melancholy. The morning after our conversation in the Crown Hotel Bar,

which extended to the plantation and production methods employed in the Dutch East Indies, I drove down to Woodbridge with de Jong. The arable land he wanted to view stretched westward from the outskirts of that small town, and was bordered to the north by the deserted estate of Boulge, which I had in any case intended to visit, for it was at Boulge that the writer Edward FitzGerald grew up almost two hundred years ago, and there too he was buried in the summer of 1883. After I had parted from Cornelis de Jong, with a warmth which it seemed he returned, I first crossed the fields from the A12 towards Bredfield, where FitzGerald was born on the 31st of March 1809 at the White House, of which all that now remains is the orangery. The main wing of the building, which went back to the mid-eighteenth century and could accommodate a large family and a no-less numerous staff of servants, was levelled to the ground in May 1944 when one of the German V-bombs, which the English nicknamed "doodlebugs", suddenly deviated from its course and caused wholly pointless damage in remote Bredfield. Boulge Hall, the neighbouring manor house into which the FitzGeralds moved in 1825, has also gone. After it burnt down in 1926, the charred walls long remained standing in the heart of the estate. Not until after the Second World War was the ruin completely demolished, presumably for building material. The park itself is now neglected and the grass has gone unmown for years. The great oaks are dying branch by branch, and the driveways, patched up here and there with broken bricks, are full of potholes brimming with black water. The copse which encloses the little church of boulge, which the FitzGeralds restored in a rather infelicitous fashion, is similarly neglected. Rotting timber, rusting iron and other debris lies around everywhere. The graves are half sunk into the ground, overshadowed by the encroaching sycamores. Small wonder, I thought, that FitzGerald, who abhorred funerals and indeed every kind of ceremony, did not wish to be buried in this sombre place and wanted his ashes scattered on the

glittering waters of the sea. If, nonetheless, he lies here, in a grave beside the hideous family mausoleum, it is owing to one of those wicked ironies against which even last wills and testaments are powerless. The FitzGeralds were an old Anglo-Norman family and had lived in Ireland for more than six hundred years before Edward FitzGerald's parents decided to settle in the county of Suffolk. The family fortune, amassed over generations through warring feuds with other lords, by ruthless subjection of the local people and by a no less ruthless marriage strategy, was legendary even at a time when the wealth of the topmost social strata was beginning to exceed all that had hitherto been known, and consisted principally, apart from properties in England, of their vast land holdings in Ireland, together with the goods and chattles, and hosts of peasants who were effectively no more than their serfs. Mary Frances FitzGerald, Edward's mother, was the sole heir to this fortune, and thus without any doubt one of the richest women in the kingdom. Her cousin, John Purcell, whom she had married, mindful of the family's motto "stesso sangue, stessa sorte", gave up his own name in favour of the name of FitzGerald, in recognition of his wife's superior position; while for her part, needless to say, Mary Frances FitzGerald saw to it that her title to the fortune was not diminished in the smallest degree by her marriage to John Purcell. The portraits that have come down to us show her as a formidable women with powerful, sloping shoulders, a truly awe-inspiring bust, and an overall appearance that astounded many contemporaries by its resemblance to the Duke of Wellington. As one would expect, the cousin she had married soon paled to a negligible if not contemptible figure beside her, especially since none of his attempts to secure for himself a position in the rapidly proliferating new industries met with any success. He tried his hand as a mining entrepreneur and at various other speculative ventures, but one after another failed until at length he had gone through all of his own not inconsiderable fortune as well as the money his wife had made available to him. After bankruptcy proceedings in a London courtroom, all that remained to him was the reputation of being a hopeless and chronic defaulter, kept by the charity of his wife. Hence he spent most of his time at the family seat in Suffolk, hunting quail and snipe and occupying himself in other similar ways, while Mary Frances held court at her London residence. Occasionally she would arrive at Bredfield in a canary-yellow carriage drawn by four black horses, with a luggage wagon and a large number of women and lady's maids in her retinue, to see how the children were and to uphold, by a brief sojourn in the house, her claims to dominion in this, from her point of view, impossibly remote place. Whenever she arrived or departed, Edward and his siblings would stand petrified at the windows of their attic nursery or hide in the driveway shrubbery, too intimidated by her splendour to dare run towards her, or wave goodbye. Even when he was past sixty, FitzGerald recalled that on visits to Bredfield his mother would sometimes come upstairs and there, enveloped in her rustling clothes and a great cloud of scent, would stalk to and fro like some strange giantess for a while, remarking upon this or that, only to disappear once again down the steep staircase, leaving us children, as he said, not much comforted. Since their father was increasingly absorbed in his own world, the young FitzGeralds were left entirely in the care of their nanny and tutor, whose rooms were also on the top floor and who tended to take out on their charges their suppressed rage at the disrespect many a time shown them by their masters. The fear of these reprisals and the humiliation that went with them hung over the children's daily routine which, apart from the cheerless meals they had to take with their minders, was governed by eternal arithmetic and writing exercises, the most odious of which was penning a weekly report to mother. In addition to this regime, they suffered from extreme boredom, for they had next to no contact with others their own age and thus all they could think of doing in their free time was to lie day-dreaming for hours on the blue-varnished floorboards in the nursery or to gaze out of the windows into the park, where hardly a living soul was ever to be seen. At best the gardener would be pushing a wheelbarrow across the lawn or Father would be returning from a shoot with the gamekeeper. Only on rare crystal-clear days, FitzGerald later recalled, could one sometimes see beyond Bredfield and indistinctly discern, over the tree tops, the white sails of ships off the coast ten miles away; and then one would lose oneself in vague dreams of liberation from this childhood dungeon. Later, when he had finished his studies at Cambridge, FitzGerald's horror of his heavily-carpeted family home stuffed with gilded furniture, works of art, and trophies of travel was so great that he refused to set food in it again. Instead of taking up residence there, in keeping with his station, he moved into a tiny two-roomed cottage on the perimeter of the estate, and there he spent the next fifteen years, from 1837 till 1853, leading a bachelor life that in many respects anticipated his later eccentricity. In the main he kept himself occupied in his hermitage with reading, in a variety of languages, with writing countless letters, with making notes towards a dictionary of commonplaces, with compiling a complete glossary of all words and phrases relating to the sea and to seafaring and with pasting up scrap books of every conceivable description. He had a particular predilection for the correspondence of bygone ages, such as that of Madame de Sévigné, who became far more real to him than even his friends who were still alive. Time after time he read what she had written, quoted her in his own letters, continuously added to the materials he was assembling for a Sévigné dictionary which would not only provide commentary on all her correspondents and all the persons and places referred to in their exchanges but would also offer a key of sorts to the way in which she had cultivated and developed the art of writing. FitzGerald did not complete the Sévigné project any more than he completed his other literary schemes, and probably never wanted to. It was not until 1914, when the era came to a close, that one of his great-nieces edited two times, now extremely hard to by, from that voluminous compilation, which lies preserved in a few cardboard boxes in Trinity College library. The only task FitzGerald finished and published in his lifetime was his marvellous rendering of the Rubaiyat of the Persian poet Omar Khayyam, with whom he felt a curiously close affinity across a distance of eight centuries. FitzGerald described the endless hours he spent translating this poem of two hundred and twenty-four lines as a colloquy with the dead man and an attempt to bring to us tidings of him. The English verses he devised for the purpose, which radiate with a pure, seemingly unselfconscious beauty, feign an anonymity that disdains even the least claim to authorship, and draw us, word by word, to an invisible point where the mediaeval orient and the fading accident can come together in a way never allowed them by the calamitous course of history. For in and out, above, about, below,/'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-Show,/Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun, / Round which the Phantom Figures come and go. The Rubaiyat was published in 1859, and it was also in that year that William Browne, who probably meant more to FitzGerald than anyone else on earth, died a painful death from serious injuries sustained in a hunting accident. The paths of the two men had first crossed on a walking tour of Wales, when FitzGerald was twenty-three and Browne just sixteen. In a letter written immediately after Browne's death, FitzGerald recalled how deeply moved he had been when, on the morning after he had conversed for a while with Browne on the steamer from Bristol, he met him again in the Tenby boarding house where they had both taken quarters and how Browne, with a chalk mark from playing billiards on his face, had seemed to him then like someone he had missed for goodness knew how long. In the years that followed that first meeting in Wales, Browne and FitzGerald often visited each other in Suffolk or Bedfordshire, driving cross-country in a gig or rambling over the fields, lunching at inns, watching the clouds as they drifted eastward, and perhaps feeling the wing of time brush their temples. A little riding, driving, eating, drinking etc. (not forgetting smoke) fill up the day, FitzGerald wrote. Browne would have his fishing rods with him, his shotgun, and watercolour requisites, whilst FitzGerald would take a book which he scarcely read because he could not take his eyes off his friend. We do not know whether he allowed himself, then or at any other time, to ponder the nature of the desire that moved him, but his constant anxiety for Browne's health was in itself indicative of the depth of his passion. For FitzGerald, Browne was the personification of an ideal, but for that very reason he seemed overshadowed by mortality from the start, and prompted fears in FitzGerald that perhaps he will not be long to be looked at. For there are signs of decay about him. Browne's subsequent marriage did not change the feelings FitzGerald had for him in the slightest, but instead confirmed his obscure intuition that he would not be able to keep him and that his friend was destined for an early death. The love which FitzGerald probably never dared to declare was not expressed until he wrote his letter of condolence to Browne's widow, who doubtless laid his curious communication aside in amazement if not consternation. FitzGerald was in his fiftieth year when he lost Browne. From then on he withdrew increasingly within himself. He had long been refusing his mother's regular invitations to her sumptuous dinner parties in London, because to his mind the ritual of communal dining was the most abominable of Society's abominations, and now he also forwent his occasional visits to the capital's galleries and concert halls, only in exceptional instances venturing beyond this immediate circle of friends. I think I shall shut myself up in the remotest nook of Suffolk and let my beard grow, he wrote, and would doubtless have done just that, had he not become disaffected with that region too, where a new breed of landowners were working the soil for all it could yield. They are felling all the trees, he complained, and tearing up the hedgerows. Soon the birds will not know where to go. One copse after another is vanishing, the grassy wayside banks where in the spring the cowslips and violets bloomed have been ploughed up and levelled, and if one now takes the path from Bredfield to Hasketon, which was once so delightful, it is like crossing a desert. Given the aversion that FitzGerald had had since childhood to his own class, the ruthless exploitation of the land, the obsession with private property, which was pursued by means increasingly dubious, and the ever more radical restriction of common rights, were profoundly abhorrent to him. And so, he said, I get to the water: where no friends are buried nor Pathways stopt up. From 1860, FitzGerald

spent a large part of his time either by the sea or on board the ocean-going yacht he had had built and named Scandal. From Woodbridge he would sail down the Deben and up the coast to Lowestoft, where he hired his crew from among the herring fishers, all the time looking for a face that reminded him of William Browne. FitzGerald sailed far out into the German Ocean, and, just as he had always refused to dress for particular occasions, so, instead of donning one of the newly fashionable yachting outfits, he would wear an old frock coat and a top hat tied fast. The sole concession he made to the stylish appearance expected of a yachtsman was the long white feather boat which he reportedly liked to sport on deck and which fluttered behind him in the breeze, visible at a good distance. In the late summer of 1863, FitzGerald decided to cross to Holland in the Scandal in order to see the portrait of the young Louis Trip, painted by Ferdinand Bol in 1652, which was in the museum in The Hague. Upon arrival in Rotterdam, his travelling companion, one George Manby of Woodbridge, persuaded him to view the great seaport first. Consequently, wrote FitzGerald, the two of us went about all day long in an open carriage, now this way, now that, till I no longer had any idea where I was, and that evening I fell exhausted into my bed. The following day passed in Amsterdam in a like unpleasant fashion, and not until the third day did we finally arrive in The Hague, after all manner of tedious incidents, only to find the museum closing until the beginning of the next week. FitzGerald, his patience already sorely tried by the irritations of travel on land, interpreted this incomprehensible exclusion as a mean trick the Dutch were playing on him personally, threw a fearful fit of rage and despair in which he variously berated the narrow-minded Dutch, his companion George Manby and himself, and insisted on returning to Rotterdam forthwith and setting sail for home. — In those years, FitzGerald spent the winter months in Woodbridge, where he had lodgings at a gunsmith's on Market Hill. Often he was to be seen walking about the town lost in thought, wearing his Inverness cape and usually, even in bad weather, only slippers on his feet. Behind him followed his black labrador, Bletsoe, which had been a gift from Browne. In 1869, after a dispute with the gunsmith's wife, who found her lodger's eccentric ways unacceptable, FitzGerald moved into his last home, a somewhat dilapidated farmhouse on the outskirts of Woodbridge, and there, as he put it, he settled to await the final act. His requirements, always modest in the extreme, had become even fewer in the course of time. For decades he had eaten a diet of vegetables, offended as he was by the consumption of large quantities of rare meat which his contemporaries considered necessary to keep one's strength up, and now he altogether dispensed with the chore of cooking, which struck him as absurd, and took little but bread, butter and tea. On fine days he sat in the garden surrounded by doves, and at other times often spent long periods at the window, which afforded a view of a goose green fringed by pollarded trees. In this solitude, as his letters show, he continued in remarkably good cheer, even though he was at times assailed by what he called the blue devil of melancholy, which had been the undoing years before of his beautiful sister Andalusia. In the autumn of 1877 he went to London once more, to see a performance of The Magic Flute. At the last moment, however, he was so dispirited by the November fog, the wet, and the dirt in the streets, that he decided against the planned visit to Covent Garden, which, he wrote, would doubtless only have spoiled the memories of Malibran and Sontag so dear to him. I think it is now best, he wrote, to attend these Operas as given in the Theatre of one's own Recollections. But there was to be little time for FitzGerald to stage such performances in his mind, for the imaginary music was drowned out by the tinnitus that troubled him now. Moreover, his eyesight grew steadily weaker. He was obliged to wear spectacles with blue- or green-tinted lenses, and had his housekeeper's boy read to him. A photograph from the 1870s, the only one he ever had taken, shows him with head averted because (he wrote

apologetically to his nieces) his ailing eyes blinked too much if he looked directly into the camera. — Every summer, FitzGerald paid a visit of a few days to his friend George Crabbe, who was vicar of Merton in Norfolk. In June 1883 he made the journey for the last time. Merton is no further than sixty miles from Woodbridge, but travelling there over the meandering railway network that had spread everywhere during FitzGerald's lifetime involved five changes and took a whole day. What was stirring within FitzGerald's breath as he leant back in his carriage watching the hedgerows and cornfields pass by outside is not recorded, but perhaps it resembled the feelings he once experienced as he sat in the mail coach from Leicester to Cambridge, when the sight of the summer countryside made him feel like an angel because suddenly, without knowing why, he found he had tears of happiness in his eyes. At Merton, Crabbe met him from the train in his dog cart. It had been a long and especially hot day, but FitzGerald remarked on the cool air and remained wrapped tight in his plaid as they drove. At table he drank a little tea but declined to eat anything. Around nine he asked for a glass of brandy and water and retired upstairs to bed. Early next morning, Crabbe heard him moving about his room, but when he went somewhat later to summon him to breakfast he found him stretched out on his bed and no longer among the living.

The shadows were lengthening as I walked in from Boulge Park to Woodbridge, where I put up for the night at the Bull Inn. The room to which I was shown by the landlord was under the roof. The clinking of glasses in the bar and a low murmur of talk rose up the staircase, with the occasional exclamation or laugh. After time was called, things gradually quietened down. I heard the woodwork of the old half-timber building, which had expanded in the heat of the day and was now contracting fraction by fraction, creaking and groaning. In the gloom of the unfamiliar room, my eyes involuntarily turned in the direction from which the sounds came, looking for the crack that might run along the low ceiling, the spot where the plaster was flaking from the wall or the mortar crumbling behind the panelling. And if I closed my eyes for a while it felt as if I were in a cabin aboard a ship on the high seas, as if the whole building were rising on the swell of a wave, shuddering a little on the crest, and then, with a sigh, subsiding into the depths. I did not get to sleep until day was breaking and the song of a blackbird was in my ear, and shortly thereafter I awoke once more from a dream in which I beheld FitzGerald, my companion of the day before, sitting at a little blue metal table in his graden in his shirtsleeves and wearing a black silk jabot and a tall top hat. Hollyhocks grown higher than a man were flowering around him, chickens were scratching about in a sandy hollow under an elder tree, and his black dog, Bletsoe, lay stretched out in the shade, whilst I, though in the dream I was unable to see myself and was thus like a ghost, sat opposite FitzGerald, playing a game of dominoes with him. Beyond the flower garden an even green park, utterly deserted, extended to the very edge of the world, where the minarets of Khorasan soared. It was not, however, the park of the FitzGerald estate at Boulge, abut that of a country house at the foot of the Slieve Bloom Mountains in Ireland where I had been a guest for a short time some years ago. In my dream I could make out far off in the distance the three-storey ivy-covered house where the Ashburys presumably still lead their secluded lives to this day; at least, it was a very secluded and indeed quite bizarre life at the time when I met them. Coming from the mountains, I had enquired after accommodation in a small, gloomy shop in Clarahill. I remember that the proprietor, a Mr O'Hare, who was wearing a curious cinnamon-coloured overcoat of thin calico, involved me in a lengthy conversation concerning Newton's theory of gravity. At some point in this talk, Mr O'Hare suddenly interrupted himself and exclaimed: The Ashburys might put you up. One of the daughters came in here some years ago with a note offering Bed and Breakfast. I was supposed to display it in the shop window. I can't think what became of it or whether they ever had any guests. Perhaps I removed it when the letters had paled in the sun. Or perhaps they came and removed it themselves. Mr O'Hare then drove me to the Ashburys in his delivery van and waited on the weedy forecourt until I was asked in. I had to knock several times before the door was opened and Catherine stood there in her faded red summer dress, with an odd stiffness that suggested she had been arrested in mid-movement by the sight of this unannounced stranger. She gazed at me wide-eyed, or rather, she looked right through me. Once I had explained why I was there, it took some time for her to recover he composure, to step a pace aside, and gesture with her left hand, scarcely perceptibly, for me to come in and take a seat in the hall. As she walked away across the stone flags, in silence, I noticed that she was barefoot. Without a sound she vanished in the darkness of the background, and just as soundlessly reappeared a few minutes later, to escort me up a staircase the broad steps of which made climbing astonishingly easy, to the first floor and along various passages to a large room, where the high windows afforded a view over the roofs of the stables and outhouses and the kitchen garden onto hay meadows combed by the wind. Beyond there were trees in various shades of green and, above them, the faint line of the mountains, barely distinguishable from the even blue of the sky. I cannot say how long I stood by one of the three windows, engrossed in that view; all I remember is hearing Catherine, who was waiting in the doorway, say, Will this be all right? and that, as I turned to her, I stammered some incoherent reply. Only when Catherine had gone did I take in the full size of the room. The floorboards were covered with a velvety layer of dust. The curtains had gone and the paper had been stripped off the walls, which had traces of whitewash with bluish streaks like the skin of a dying body, and reminded me of one of those maps of the far north on which next to nothing is marked. The only items of furniture in the room were a table and chair and a narrow collapsible iron bedstead of the kind that army officers used to have with them on campaigns. Whenever I rested on that bed over the next few days, my consciousness began to dissolve at the edges, so that at times I could hardly have said how I had got there or indeed where I was. Repeatedly I felt as if I were lying in a traumatic fever in some kind of field hospital. From outside I heard the cries of the peacocks, which went right through me, but what I saw in my mind's eye was not the yard in which they perched on the very top of the junk that had been piling up there for years but a battlefield somewhere in Lombardy over which the vultures circled, and, all around, a country laid waste by war. The armies had long since marched on. I alone, falling from one swoon into the next, was left in a house that had been looted of everything. These images became the more real in my head because the Ashburys lived under their roof like refugees who have come through dreadful ordeals and do not now dare to settle in the place where they have ended up. It struck me that all the members of the family were continually wandering hither and thither along the corridors and up and down the stairs. One rarely saw them sitting calm and collected, singly or together. Even their meals they usually ate standing. What work they did always had about it something aimless and meaningless and seemed not so much part of a daily routine as an expression of a deeply engrained distress. Ever since leaving school in 1974, Edmund, the youngest had been working on a fat-bellied boat a good ten yards in length, although, as he casually informed me, he knew nothing about boat-building and had no intention of ever going to sea in his unshapely barge. It's not going to be launched. It's just something I do. I have to have something to do. Mrs Ashbury collected flower seeds in paper bags. Once she had written the name, date, location, colour and other details on the bags, she would clap them over the dead heads of the blooms, in the overgrown flower beds or further afield in the meadows, and tie them up with string. Then she would cut off all the stalks, and bring the bagged heads indoors and hang them up on a much-knotted line that criss-crossed what was once the library. There were so many of these white-bagged flowerstalks hanging under the library ceiling that they resembled clouds of paper, and when Mrs Ashbury stood on the library steps to hang up or take down the rustling seed-bags she half-vanished among them like a saint ascending into heaven. Once they had been taken down, the bags were stored under some inscrutable system on the shelves, which had evidently long since been unburdened of books. I do not think Mrs Ashbury had any idea what distant fields the seeds she collected might one day fall on, any more than Catherine and her two sisters Clarissa and Christina knew why they spent several hours every day in one of the north-facing rooms, where they had stored great quantities of remnant fabrics, sewing multicoloured pillowcases, counterpanes and similar items. Like giant children under an evil spell, the three unmarried daughters, much of an age, sat on the floor amidst these mountains of material, working away and only rarely breathing a word to each other. The movement they made as they drew the thread sideways and upwards with every stitch reminded me of things that were so far back in the past that I felt my heart sink at the thought of how little time now remained. On one occasion Clarissa told me that she and her sisters had once intended to start an interior decorating business, but the plan came to nothing, she said, both because of their inexperience and because there was no call in their neighbourhood for such a service. Perhaps that was why they mostly undid what they had sewn either on the same day, the next day or the day after that. It was also possible that in their imagination they envisaged something of such extraordinary beauty that the work they completed invariably disappointed them. At least that was what I thought, when on one of my visits to their workshop they showed me the pieces that had been spared the unstitching. One of them, a bridal gown made of hundreds of scraps of silk embroidered with silken thread, or rather woven over cobweb-fashion, which hung on a headless tailor's dummy, was a work of art so colourful and of such intricacy and perfection that it seemed almost to have come to life, and at the time I could no more believe my eyes than now I can trust my memory.

On the evening before my departure I was standing out on the terrace with Edmund, leaning on the stone balustrade. It was so quiet that I thought I could hear the cries of the bats that flitted zigzag through the airspace. The park was sinking into darkness when Edmund, after a protracted silence, suddenly said: I have set up the projector in the library. Mother was wondering whether you might want to see what things used to be like here. Inside, Mrs Ashbury was already waiting for the show to begin. I sat down beside her under the paper-bag heavens, the light went out, the projector began to whirr, and on the bare wall above the mantelpiece the mute images of the past appeared, at times quite still and then again following jerkily one upon another, headlong, and rendered unclear by the projection scratches. From a window on the upper floor one looked across the surrounding land, the clumps of trees, fields and meadows, and vice versa, approaching the forecourt from the park, one saw the front of the house, first seeming toy-sized from a distance, then towering ever higher till at length it almost toppled out of the frame. Nowhere was there a sign of neglect. The drive was sanded, the hedges were clipped, the beds in the kitchen garden trim, and the now tumbledown outhouses still well maintained. Later one saw the Ashburys at tea, sitting in a kind of marquee one bright summer's day. It was Edmund's christening, said Mrs Ashbury. Clarissa and Christina were playing badminton. Catherine held a black Scots terrier in her arms. In the background, an old butler was making for the entrance with a laden tray. A maidservant with a cap on her head appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield her eyes from the sun. Edmund put in another reel. Much of what followed had to do with work in the garden and on the estate. I remember a slight lad pushing a huge old-fashioned wheelbarrow; a mower pulled by a tiny pony and steered by a dwarfish driver, mowing straight lines up and down the lawn; a view of the dark hothouse where cucumbers were growing; and a series of over-exposed pictures of a field that looked almost snow-white, where dozens of farm labourers were busy cutting the wheat and binding the sheaves. When the last reel was through there was silence for a long time in the library, which was now lit only dimly by the light from the hall. Not until Edmund had stowed the projector in its case and left the room did Mrs Ashbury begin to speak. She told me that she had married in 1946, immediately after her husband came out of the army, and that a few months later, following the sudden death of her father-in-law, they had come to Ireland, quite contrary to the expectations both of them had of their future life, to take possession of the property he had inherited, which was then as good as unsaleable. At that time, said Mrs Ashbury, she had had not the slightest notion of Ireland's Troubles, and to this day they remained alien to her. I remember waking the first night in this house, feeling I was completely out of this world. The moon was shining in at the window, and the light lay so strangely on the layer of wax left on the floor by more than a century of dripping candles that I felt I was adrift on a sea of quicksilver. My husband, said Mrs Ashbury, never said a word about the Troubles, on principle, although he must have witnessed terrible things during the civil war, or perhaps because of that. Only little by little, from the curt answers he gave to my questions on the matter, did I piece together something os his family history, and the history of the land-owning class that became hopelessly impoverished in the decades following the civil war. But the picture I put together was never more than a rough sketch. Apart from my extremely reticent husband, said Mrs Ashbury, my only other source of information was the legends about the Troubles, part tragic and part ludicrous, that had formed during the long years of decline in the heads of our servants, whom we had inherited together with the rest of the inventory and who were themselves already part of history, as it were. Years after we moved in, for instance, I learnt a little from our butler, Quincey, about that dreadful midsummer night in 1920 when the Randolphs' house six miles away was set on fire while the Randolphs themselves were dining with my future parents-in-law. According to Quincey, the rebel Republicans first assembled the servants in the hall and told them without further ado that they had one hour to pack their personal belongings and make some tea for themselves and the freedom fighters, and then a great fire of retribution would be raised. First, said Mrs Ashbury, the children were woken, and the dogs and cats, which were quite beside themselves with premonitions of disaster, were rounded up. Later, according to Quincey, who was Colonel Randolph's valet at the time, all the inhabitants of the house stood out on the lawn amongst items of luggage and furniture and all the nonsensical things one grabs at in a state of panic and fear. At the last moment, in Quincey's telling, he had had to run up to the second floor one more time to rescue the cockatiel that belonged to old Mrs Randolph, who, as it turned out on the following day, was deprived in the catastrophe of her up until then perfectly lucid mind. Powerless, they were all forced to stand by as the Republicans dragged a big drum of petrol from the garage across the courtyard and then, with a loud Heave ho! rolled it up the steps and into the hall, where they spilled out the contents. Within minutes of the first torch being hurled in, the flames were shooting from the windows and the roof, and before long it was as if one was looking into an immense furnace full of red-hot fire and flying sparks. I do not think, said Mrs Ashbury, that one can even begin to imagine the thoughts of the victims when they witness a sight like that. At all events, the Randolphs, who had always lived fearing the worst and yet did not believe that it could ever happen, were alerted by a gardener who had escaped on a bicycle, and, accompanied by my parents-in-law, drove over to the blaze, which was visible from a long way off. When they arrived at the scene of destruction, those who had started the fire had long disappeared, and all they could do was hug their children and join those huddled together there speechless and paralysed with horror like shipwrecked survivors on a raft. Not till daybreak did the fire abate and the black contours of the burnt-out shell stand out against the sky. The ruin, said Mrs Ashbury, was subsequently demolished. That was before my time, and I never saw it. They say two or three hundred country houses were burnt down during the civil war, regardless of whether they were relatively modest properties or stately homes such as

Summerhill, where the Austrian Empress Elisabeth had once been so happy. To the best of my knowledge, said Mrs Ashbury, people were never harmed by the rebels. Evidently burning the houses down was the most effective way of driving out those families who were identified, rightly or wrongly, with the detested rule of the English. In the years after the end of the civil war, even those who had survived unscathed left the country if they possibly could. The only ones who stayed on were those who had no livelihood except what they derived from their estates. Every attempt to sell the houses and land was doomed to failure from the very start, because in the first place there were no buyers far and wide, and in the second, even if a purchaser had appeared, one could hardly have lived in Bournemouth or Kensington for more than a month on the proceeds. At the same time, nobody in Ireland had any idea how they could possibly go on. Farming was in the doldrums, labourers were demanding wages nobody could afford to pay, fewer crops were being planted, and incomes were steadily diminishing. The situation grew more hopeless every year, and the signs of increasing poverty, apparent everywhere, grew more and more ominous. Keeping up the houses even in the most rudimentary way had long been impossible. The paintwork was flaking off the window encasements and the doors; the curtains became threadbare; the wallpaper peeled off the walls; the upholstery was worn out; it was raining in everywhere, and people put out tin tubs, bowls and pots to catch the water. Soon they were obliged to abandon the rooms on the upper storeys, or even whole wings, and retreat to more or less usable quarters on the ground floor. The window panes in the locked-up rooms misted over with cobwebs, dry rot advanced, vermin bore the spores of mould to every nook and cranny, and monstrous brownish-purple and black fungal growths appeared on the walls and ceilings, often the size of an ox-head. The floorboards began to give, the beams of the ceilings sagged, and the panelling and staircases, long since rotted within, crumbled to sulphurous yellow dust, at times overnight. Every so often, usually after a long period of rain or extended droughts or indeed after any change in the weather, a sudden disastrous collapse would occur in the midst of the encroaching decay that went almost unnoticed, and had assumed the character of normality. Just as people supposed they could hold a particular line, some dramatic and unanticipated deterioration would compel them to evacuate further areas, till they really had no way out and found themselves forced to the last post, prisoners in their own homes. They say that a great-uncle of my husband's in County Clare, who used to run his house in the grand style, ended up living in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury. For years all he supposedly ate for dinner was a simple dish of potatoes prepared by his butler, who now had to double as his cook, although he did still wear a black dinner jacket and open a bottle of Bordeaux, the cellar not being quite empty yet. Great-uncle and the butler, who were both called William, so Quincey told me, and died on the same day, both well past the age of eighty, had their beds in the kitchen, said Mrs Ashbury, and goodness knows how often I have wondered whether it was a sense of duty that kept the butler going till his master no longer needed him, or whether great-uncle gave up the ghost when his exhausted servant passed away, knowing that without his presence he wouldn't survive a single day. Probably it was the servants, who often worked for decades for scant wages and were no more able to find a place elsewhere at so advanced an age than their masters were, who kept things more or less ticking over. When they lay down to die, the end of those they had looked after was often imminent as well. In our own case it was no different, except that we shared in the general decline rather late in the day. I soon realized that if the Ashburys had been able to keep their property until after the War, it was purely because they kept putting in money from a substantial legacy left to them in the early Thirties, which had shrunk to a tiny amount by the time my husband died. Even so, I was always convinced that things would improve one day. I simply refused to believe that the society we were part of had long since collapsed. Shortly after we arrived in Ireland, Gormanston Castle was sold at auction. Straffan was sold in 1949, Cartin in 1950, French Park in 1953, Killeen Rockingham in 1957, Powerscourt in 1961, not to mention the smaller estates. The extent of our family fiasco only became clear to me when I had to fend for myself and try to support us all somewhat. Since I had no money to pay the labourers' wages, I soon had no choice but to give up farming. We sold off the land bit by bit, which kept the worst at bay for a few years, and as long as we had one or two servants in the house it was still possible to keep up appearances, to the outside world and in our own eyes. When Quincey died, I no longer knew what to do. First I sold the silver and china at auction, and then little by little the pictures, the books and the furniture. But nobody ever showed an interest in taking on the house, which was getting more and more run down, and so we have remained tied to it, like damned souls to their place. Whatever we have tried, from the girls' sewing to the nursery garden Edmund once started to our notion of having paying guests, has without fail gone wrong. you, said Mrs Ashbury, are the first guest who's ever found his way here in the almost ten years since we put the advertisement in the Clarahill grocer's window. Unfortunately I am a completely impractical person, caught up in endless trains of thought. All of us are fantasists, ill-equipped for life, the children as much as myself. It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder. When Mrs Ashbury had finished her story, I felt that its significance for me lay in an unspoken invitation to stay there with them and share in a life that was becoming more innocent with every day that passed. The fact that I did not do so was a. . failure that still sometimes seems like a shadow crossing my soul. The next morning, when I came to say goodbye, I had to look for Catherine for a long while. At last I found her in the kitchen garden, which was overgrown with deadly nightshade, valerian, angelica and shot rhubarb. In the red summer frock she was wearing on the day of my arrival, she was leaning against the trunk of the mulberry tree that had once marked the centre of the neatly laid-out herb and vegetable beds within the high brick wall. I made my way through the wilderness to the island of shade from which Catherine was gazing at me. I have come to say goodbye, I said, stepping into the bower formed by the spreading branches. She was holding a broad-brimmed hat like a pilgrim's, the same red as her dress, and now that I was standing beside her she seemed very far away. She looked right through me, her eyes vacant. I have left my address and telephone number, so that if you ever want. . I broke the sentence off, not knowing how it might continue. In any case, I noticed that Catherine was not listening. At one point, she said after a while, at one point we thought we might raise silkworms in one of the empty rooms, But then we never did. Oh, for the countless things one fails to do! — Years after that last exchange with Catherine Ashbury, I saw her again, or thought I did, in Berlin in March 1993. I had taken the underground to Schlesisches Tor, and after strolling around that dreary part of the city for a time I came upon a small group of people waiting to be admitted to a dilapidated building that might once have been a garage for hackney cabs or something of the kind. According to a billboard, an unfinished play I had never heard of, by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, was to be performed on a stage behind this quite untheatrical façade. In the gloomy space within, the seating proved to be tiny wooden stools, which immediately put one in a childlike mood of craving marvels. Before I could account to myself for my thoughts, there she stood on the stage, incredibly wearing the same red dress, with the same light-coloured hair and holding in her hand the same pilgrim's hat, she or her very image, Catherine of Siena, in an empty room, and then far from her father's house, wearied by the heat of the day and the thorns and stones. In the background, I recall, was a pale view of mountains, perhaps in the Trentino, watery green as if they had just risen from ice-bound polar seas. And Catherine, as the sunlight faded, sank down below a tree, took off her shoes and laid her hat aside. I think I shall sleep here, she said, or rest a little. Be still, my heart. The tranquil evening will draw its mantle over our ailing senses. .

From Woodbridge to Orford, down to the sea, is a good four-hour walk. The roads and tracks pass through dry, empty stretches of land which, by the end of a long summer, are almost like a desert. This sparsely populated part of the country has hardly ever been cultivated, and, throughout the ages, was never more than a pasture for sheep reaching from one horizon to the other. When the shepherds and their flocks disappeared in the early nineteenth century, heather and scrub began to spread. This was encouraged as far as possible by the lords of the manors of Rendlesham Villa, Sudbourne Hall, Orwell Park and Ash High House, who had in their possession almost the whole of the Sandlings, in order to create favourable conditions for the hunting of small game, which had become fashionable in the Victorian age. Men of middle-class background who had achieved great wealth through industrial enterprise, wanting to establish a legitimate position in higher society, acquired large country mansions and estates, where they abandoned the utilitarian principles they had always upheld in favour of hunting and shooting, which, although it was quite useless and bent only on destruction, was not considered by anyone as an aberration. In the past, hunting had been the privilege of royalty and the aristocracy, and had been pursued in parks and chases established over centuries especially for the purpose, but now anyone who wanted to transmute their stock market gains into status and repute would hold hunting parties at their estates, several times a season, with as much ostentation as possible. Beside the name and rank of the invited guests, the respect that accrued to the host of such parties was in direct proportion to the number of creatures that were killed. The management of the estate was thus governed by considerations of what was necessary to maintain and increase the stocks of game. Thousands and thousands of pheasants were raised every year in pens, to be let loose later into the huge hunting preserves, which were now lost to farming and made inaccessible. As their rights were curtailed, the rural population not engaged in rearing pheasants, breeding gun dogs, as gamekeepers or beaters or in any other capacity connected with shooting, were forced to quit the places where they had lived for generations. As a consequence, in the early years of the twentieth century, at Hollesley Bay, just inland from the coast, a labour colony later known as Colonial College was established, from which those for whom there was no future went out to New Zealand or Australia after a given time. The Hollesley Bay premises are now a borstal, and young offenders can be seen at work in the fields nearby, always in groups and wearing luminous orange jackets. The pheasant craze was at its height in the decades before the First World War, when Sudbourne Hall alone employed two dozen gamekeepers, and a tailor for the sole purpose of keeping their livery in trim. There were times when six thousand pheasants were gunned down in a single day, not to mention the other fowl, hares and rabbits. The staggering scores were punctiliously recorded in the game books of the rivalling estates. One of the foremost shooting domains in the Sandlings was Bawdsey, with more than eight thousand acres on the north bank of the Deben. In the early 1880s, Sir Cuthbert Quilter, a business baron who had risen from the lower classes, had a family

seat built on a prominent site by the river estuary, reminiscent both of an Elizabethan mansion and of a maharajah's palace. Erecting this architectural marvel was a demonstration for Quilter of the justice of his claim to status, a demonstration quite as unyielding as the choice of his heraldic motto, plutôt mourir que changer, which refuted all bourgeois compromise. At that time, the craving for power in men of his kind was at its most acute. From where they stood there seemed no reason why things should not go on in this vein forever, from one spectacular success to the next. It was no coincidence that the German Empress was taking a convalescent holiday across the river in Felixstowe, which had become a desirable resort in recent years. For weeks, the royal yacht Hohenzollern lay at anchor there, a visible token of the possibilities now open to the entrepreneurial spirit. Under the patronage of their imperial majesties, the North Sea coast might become one great health resort for the upper classes, equipped with all the amenities of modern life. Everywhere, hotels mushroomed from the barren land. Promenades and bathing facilities were established, and piers grew out

into the sea. Even in the most abandoned spot in the entire region, Shingle Street, which now consists of just one wretched row of humble houses and cottages and where I have never encountered a single human being, a spa centre by the grandiose name of German Ocean Mansions designed for two hundred guests was built at the time, if one can believe the records, and staffed with personnel who were recruited from germany. Today there is no more trace of it. Indeed, there seems to have been all manner of ties across the North Sea between the British and German Empires at that period, ties that were expressed first and foremost in the colossal manifestations of bad taste of those who wanted a place in the sun no matter at what cost. Cuthbert Quilter's Anglo-Indian fairy-tale palace in the dunes would doubtless have appealed to the German Kaiser's artistic sensibility, since he had a pronounced penchant for any kind of extravagance. Likewise one can picture Quilter, who added another tower to his beachfront castle for every million he added to his fortune, as a guest abord the Hohenzollern. One imagines him, say, together with gentlemen from the Admiralty who had also been invited, at the gymnastic exercises which preceded Sunday service at sea. What daring plans might not a man of Quilter's ilk have evolved, egged on by a likeminded man such as Kaiser Wilhelm — envisaging an open-air paradise extending from Felixstowe via Norderney to Sylt, to keep the nations fit; or the foundation of a new North Sea civilization, if not indeed an Anglo-German global alliance, symbolized by a state cathedral, visible far and wide across the waves, on the island of Heligoland. In reality, of course, history took a quite different turn, for, whenever one is imagining a bright future, the next disaster is just around the corner. War was declared, the German hotel employees were sent back home, there were no more summer visitors, and one morning a zeppelin like an airborne whale appeared over the coast, while across the Channel train after train with troops and equipment rolled to the front, whole tracts of land were ploughed up by mortar fire, and the death strip between the front lines was strewn with phosphorescent corpses. The German kaiser lost his Empire, and the world of Cuthbert Quilter too went into a gradual decline. His means, which had once seemed inexhaustible, dwindled to such an extent that maintaining the estate no longer made any sense. Raymond Quilter, who inherited Bawdsey, entertained the holidaymakers at Felixstowe, who were now of a somewhat less superior breed, with sensational parachute jumps onto the beach. In 1936 he was obliged to sell Bawdsey Manor to the nation. THe proceeds were sufficient to cover his tax liabilities and to finance his passion for flying, which meant more to him than anything else. Having surrendered the family property, he moved into the former chauffeur's quarters, but would still stay at the Dorchester when in London. As a token of the special esteem in which he was held there, the Quilter standard, a golden pheasant on a black ground, was hoisted alongside the Union Jack whenever he arrived. He was accorded this rare privilege by the establishment's reserved staff because of the reputation for chivalry he had enjoyed ever since he had parted, without regret, from the estates his great-uncle had acquired, since which time, apart from a modest amount of independent capital, he had owned nothing but his aeroplane and a runway in an isolated field.

In the years following the First World War, countless estates were broken up in the same way as Quilter's Bawdsey. The manor houses were either left to fall down or used for other purposes, as boys' boarding schools, approved schools, insane asylums, old people's homes, or reception camps for refugees from the Third Reich. Bawdsey Manor itself was for a long time the domicile and research centre of the team under Robert Watson-Watt that developed radar, which now spreads its invisible net through out the entire airspace. To this day, the area between Woodbridge and the sea remains full of military installations. Time and again, as one walks across the wide plains, one passes barracks, gateways and fenced-off areas where, behind thin plantations of Scots pines, weapons are concealed in camouflaged hanars and grass-covered bunkers, the weapons with which, if an emergency should arise, whole countries and continents can be transformed into smoking heaps of stone and ash in no time. Not far from Orford, and already tired from my long walk, this notion took possession of me when I was hit by a sandstorm. I was approaching the eastern fringe of Rendlesham Forest, which covers several square miles and was for the most part reduced to broken and splintered timber in the terrible hurricane of the 16th of October 1987. Suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and a wind came up,

blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the greyish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out, through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken. When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down. — I walked the rest of the way in a daze. All I remember is that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth and that I felt as if I were walking on the spot. When at last I reached Orford, I climbed to the top of the castle keep, from where there is a view over the houses of the town, the green gardens and pallid fenlands, and the coastline to north and south, lost in the shimmering distance. Orford Castle was completed in 1165

and for centuries was the foremost bastion against the constant threat of invasion. Not until Napoleon was contemplating the conquest of the British Isles — his engineers audaciously planning to dig a tunnel under the Channel, and envisaging an armada of hot-air balloons advancing on the English coast — were new defensive measures taken, with the building of martello towers along the seashore, a mile or so apart. There are seven of these circular forts between Felixstowe and Orford alone. To the best of my knowledge, their effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn, and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements. In the early Forties, the scientists and technicians at Bawdsey built radar masts along the east coast, eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night. No one knew what purpose they served any more than they knew about the many other secret projects then being pursued in the military research establishments around Orford. Naturally this gave rise to all manner of speculation about an invisible web of death rays, a new kind of nerve gas, or some hideous means of mass destruction that would come into play if the Germans attempted a landing. And it is a fact that until recently a file labelled Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk was in the archives of the Ministry of Defence, embargoed for seventy-five years as distinct from the usual practice of releasing documents after thirty, on the grounds that (so the irrepressible rumours claimed) it gave details of a horrifying incident in Shingle Street for which no government could accept public responsibility. I myself heard, for instance, that experiments were conducted at Shingle Street with biological weapons designed to make whole regions uninhabitable. I also heard tell of a system of pipes extending far out to sea, by means of which a petroleum inferno could be unleashed with such explosive rapidity, in the event of an invasion, that the very sea would start to boil. In the course of the preparatory experimentations, an entire company of English sappers were said to have met their deaths, inadvertently as it were, in the most appalling manner, according to eye witnesses who claimed to have seen the charred bodies, contorted with pain, lying on the beach or still out at sea in their boats. Others maintain that those who died in the wall of fire were German landing forces wearing English uniforms. When access to the Shingle Street following a lengthy campaign was finally granted in 1992 in the local press, it revealed nothing that might have justified the top-secret classification, or

substantiated the stories that had been circulating since the end of the war. But it seems likely, one commentator wrote, that sensitive material was removed before the file was opened, and so the mystery of Shingle Street remains. — Presumably part of the reason why rumours like this one concerning Shingle Street endured so obstinately was that, during the Cold War era, the Ministry of Defence continued to maintain Secret Weapons Research Establishments on the coast of Suffolk, and imposed the strictest silence on the work carried out in them. The inhabitants of Orford, for example, could only speculate about what went on at the Orfordness site, which, though perfectly visible from the town, was effectively no easier to reach than the Nevada desert or an atoll in the South Seas. For my part, I well recall standing down by the harbour when I first visited Orford in 1972 and looking across to what the locals simply called "the island", which resembled a penal colony in the Far East. I had been studying the curious coastal land formations at Orford on the map, and was interested in the promontory of Orfordness, which seemed to have an extraterritorial quality about it. Stone by stone, over a period of millennia, it had shifted down from the north across the mouth of the River Alde, in such a way that the tidal lower reaches, known as the ore, run for some twelve miles just inside the present coastline before flowing into the sea. When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach "the island", but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there, since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research at that site. One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after I had had a look around. As we crossed the river in his blue-painted boat, he told me that people still mostly avoided Orfordness. Even the beach fishermen, who were no strangers to solitude, had given up night-fishing out there after a few attempts, allegedly because it wasn't worth their while, but in reality because they couldn't stand the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere, and in some cases even became emotionally disturbed for some time. Once we were on the other side, I took leave of my ferryman and, after climbing over the embankment, walked along a partially overgrown tarmac track running straight through a vast, yellowing field. The day was dull and oppressive, and there was so little breeze that not even the ears of the delicate quaking grass were nodding. It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country, and I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly liberated and deeply despondent. I had not a single thought in my head. With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound. perhaps that was why I was frightened almost to death when a hare that had been hiding in the tufts of grass by the wayside started up, right at my feet, and shot off down the rough track before darting sideways, this way, then that, into the field. It must have been cowering there as I approached, heart pounding as it waited, until it was almost too late to get away with its life. In that very fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight, its fear cut right through me. I still see what occurred in that one tremulous instant with an undiminished clarity. I see the edge of the grey tarmac and every individual blade of grass, I see the hare leaping out of its hiding-place, with its ears laid back and a curiously human expression on its face that was rigid with terror and strangely divided; and in its eyes, turning to look back as it fled and almost popping out of its head with fright, I see myself, become one with it. Not till half-an-hour later, when I reached the broad dyke that separates the grass expanse from the pebble bank that slopes to the shoreline, did the blood cease its clamour in my veins. For a long while I stood on the bridge that leads to the former research establishment. Far behind me to the west,

scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the inhabited land; to the north and south, in flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones,

in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas,

which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the shower heads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways. Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words. All I do know is that I finally walked along the raised embankment from the Chinese Wall bridge past the old pumphouse towards the landing stage, to my left in the fading fields a collection of black Nissen huts, and to my right, across the river, the mainland. As I was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman, the evening sun emerged from behind the clouds, bathing in its light the far-reaching arc of the seashore. The tide was advancing up the river, the water was shining like tinplate, and from the radio masts high above the marshes came an even, scarcely audible hum. The roofs and towers of Orford showed among the tree tops, seeming so close that I could touch them. There, I thought, I was once at home. And then, through the growing dazzle of the light in my eyes, I suddenly saw, amidst the darkening colours, the sails of the long-vanished windmills turning heavily in the wind.