Long-horned cattle mope and steam (Landseer-fashion) by the river’s threatened banks. The water is rising, the Darent spreading itself — with the ambition of becoming a small lake. On the gates of ‘Meadow View’ cattle are cloned in wrought iron, all pelt and no legs. Like Scottish comedians who have run out of patter. And taken to Bud Flanagan overcoats. Another high risk property, Bridge House, features a Notre-Dame gargoyle among the hanging baskets; a horned demon on an Ionic column. Two more devils grin from the lintel of the door. Welcome to Eynsford, twinned with Rennes-le-Château.
Atkins is hooded and in dark glasses. As is Moose Jackson. I legitimise them with a flash-photograph. Moose has the cultural reference at his finger tips: Chris Marker’s La jetée. Future dead masked against the horror of the past. Against documentary evidence of bent fictions.
The church of St Martin runs with the theme of heads: detached and poking out of walls. As if these gargoyles, shrunken saints, were abandoning Christianity and reverting to paganism. Eynsford, according to Arthur Mee, has claim to ‘a straight mile unique on the map of rural England, beginning with the site of a Roman house, passing a Norman castle, and ending at the site of a Saxon settlement’. Fifteen chill faces peek from the plaster, measuring their mile, the lost alignments. Green Men, May Queens. The energy is in the stone, the natives can’t compete. They do their best, medieval carvings brought to life (with some reluctance). They move slowly, in case their limbs should crumble into dust. They stare.
We tramp, gratefully, towards the motorway (the M20). At Farningham, on the road’s edge, we discover a bookshop of such transcendent obscurity that it has slipped Driffield’s net: no listing in drif’s guide (or in the orthodox directory put out by Skoob). The now-vanished Driffield, more dedicated than Pevsner, went everywhere. The exiled German scholar was, by Drif’s reckoning, an amateur: he slept at night, sometimes for as much as three hours. Drif lay awake, lights on, radio blaring, licking his pencil and writing up the day’s report, barking at his own witticisms. He succeeded in turning himself into a brand name and then he disappeared. His books, triumphs of crazed scholarship, dedicated misinformation, sledgehammer humour, self-confessed genius, are out of print; treasured by antiquarians who don’t want their quests simplified by the Net. No other information-obsessive, so far as I know, has managed a literary form that so nearly duplicates the sound of his own voice: Drif writes at a bellow. He tub-thumps sentences, rivets puns. He moves across the landscape a little faster than the speed of light. Dosed on black coffee, he polishes his putdowns before he sets out; he’s bored by what he knows. The inertia, the snobbery, the incompetence, the petty corruptions of libricides skulking in their pits. His books are a labour of tough love, the perfect means of ensuring that he has enemies everywhere. The trade is masochistic. They wait, quaking, for the appearance of the grand inquisitor on his annual progress. They can’t bribe him with under-the-counter desiderata, or complimentary mugs of coffee swill. Lacking all scruples (and proud of it), he is incorruptible. He will pocket the bunce, but it won’t sugar his report.
Farningham and Drif were made for each other. It was a charity to step inside this shop; heaped, mounded, treble-stacked with necrotic paper. Bibliographic scrag ends. The slurry of the publishing industry. Titles so undesirable that Oxfam would have left them in a black bag on the steps of Sue Ryder. I was transfixed. The others panicked. They started, as civilians will, to pout like goldfish. To mistrust the air: they’d been landed in an alien environment.
It was a point of honour to walk out of this dump with something, anything. Courteous as a Cossack, I tipped out boxes, ransacked shelves. The best I could do was Miriam Colwell’s Young, a ‘post-Salinger, first-person narrative’ from 1955 (which I tried unsuccessfully to punt to my ageing Juvenile Delinquency collectors). ‘Intimate story of two American teenage girls… blue jeans, cokes & convertibles.’ VG in somewhat rubbed dust-jacket. Yours for a tenner. Postage included.
Renchi, as I feared, engaged the proprietor in conversation. Like all dealers, I treated this man as a necessary obstacle, a palsied hand into which to drop a few coins. Never give them an opening. The only reason the shop existed was to bring the unwary in from the street, to provide an audience for: The Story. The Ancient Mariner experience. Simon’s tale, I had to admit, was one of the best. His special needs, I assumed, were no more extreme than those you’d find in a hundred such establishments: bookdealers, even if they begin as fun-loving athletes, soon crumple into melancholia, horseshoe-spine, life-threatening obesity, shingles, myopia, incipient gangrene, flatulence. Simon had a yarn to pitch that would have subdued a crew with normal human sympathies. His image and his story travelled with us for miles. He became the messenger, the guide for that walk: dead books and a keeper waiting to talk to travellers. The oracle of Farningham.
Simon had been a Mirror journalist at Canary Wharf. A near-name. Busy, successful. With prospects. Before, as he explained (haltingly, painfully), he had the accident; and flew out of the shattered back window of a car. Simon wasn’t slim or lithe. That’s what stayed in my mind, the horror of being sucked from the window, backwards. Squeezed like a bladder of offal through the tight slit of a letterbox.
He recalls that frozen instant of time so vividly. One minute, a career journalist sitting comfortably — then nothing makes sense. Glass re-seals itself behind him, the road unfurls. His unprotected head strikes a lamppost: with the impact of something fired from a cannon. He spends a hundred days in a coma; fed by his mother with a spoon. That period isn’t lost, it’s always there like a story he’s been told. Deleted, mythical. He quits his damaged shell and inhabits another place. He speaks of it now as a ‘dream’; erotic, slightly saline. He saw a naked girl on a marble slab. There were pale encounters in a nether world. He remembers the moves he made. When and how he decided to return.
After such an experience, what does the bookshop matter? Other people’s words. Cancelled texts. Vanities from which a new life must be forged. The horror and the vision are both replayed: he has to make sense of them. The shop is a cave of random confessions, strangers’ voices. He is its curator. In perpetuity. When I give him his 20p, he mutters: ‘Oh good, now I can have some lunch.’
Eynsford’s famous straight mile, the broad valley floor, made it attractive to planners: an east/west road (achieved) and a new airport for London (outflanked by powerful local interests). Metropolitan greed nibbles at this countryside: flour mills, tall chimney stacks. We pass under one motorway and on towards a railway and a viaduct.
As we cross the Darent at Horton Kirby, we meet with a fishing party that would have delighted Izaak Walton. True Kentish men (under the unimpressed eye of a Romany-dark woman) doing something illegitimate, robbing kingfishers of their prey. The poachers have the characteristic pallor of the interhighway settlements: turnip faces, thicker at base than crown, large ears, lank hair curtaining mercury eyes. The juveniles favour a Beckham fuzz, to save the prison barber work. Both types are stubbled, blue-chinned, it’s a medical condition. Loose mouths, tugged up at one corner, sneer. The teeth, surprisingly, are big and white and strong: the fisherfolk look like Hollywood actors playing backwoods cannibals.
They’re not angling for perch or pike or eel. A spotter crabs his way along a sewage pipe while his mate drops in the bright yellow line: with a large magnet on the end. They’re dipping for coin, or scrap; rings, crash helmets, bicycle wheels. The suspicion is: whatever is down there in the murky stream, they know about it. The fishing party is a none-too-subtle method of recovering swag. The booty from the day’s work, so far, is one hub cab and an empty tin can. The woman spits.