A medical report was issued — and leaked. Lamont fumed. The motorcade rolled to Wentworth. The dictator was boarded out in an up-market Barratt home. Newsreel crews were on hand to capture the phone call, expressing support, from Margaret Thatcher. From this point on, footage is real estate promo: wheelchair access to garden, picture windows, double-glazing to neutralise the racket from drummers beating out their protest at the limits of the security cordon.
Wentworth swallows celebrity. And takes its sheen into the immaculate grass, the dazzling windows.
The story retreats into a blizzard of newsreel clips. Police car with flashing sign: KEEP OUT. Pinochet photo-op with Baroness Thatcher.
Thatcher: ‘Senator Pinochet was a staunch friend of Britain throughout the Falklands War. His reward from this government was to be held prisoner for sixteen months.’
Aerial view: convoy of cars taking Pinochet to military airbase in Lincolnshire for flight home to Chile.
Peter Schaard (friend of Pinochet): ‘I have seen a deterioration in his health — more than anything else his mental health. He said that when he was back in Chile he would like to learn to read again.’
Aerial view: RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire. Barbed wire. Plane taxiing on runway. Plane taking off. Protesters drumming, Wentworth. Held back by police.
Voice-over: ‘The former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, has won his fight to go home. He is on his way back to Chile this lunchtime, after attempts to have him extradited finally failed. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ruled this morning that he wouldn’t send him to Spain to face trial. The operation to move the General out of the country this morning was quite a cloak and dagger affair. He was finally smuggled out of the Wentworth estate where he’s been staying, in a police convoy, shortly after ten o’clock.’
Cloak and dagger is something we do better than most. If America wants you in the dock, as a redundant Serb, the wrong kind of Afghan, you go down. If you’ve got previous as a top customer for military hardware, you walk. That seems to be the rule. Noted political thinker Lord Lamont mused: ‘I don’t see how the world can conduct business between states if heads of government do not have immunity from prosecution. Many democratic politicians, who may find themselves held accountable — perhaps Lady Thatcher — for things that happened in their name, will be very uneasy about this.’
Neil Belton, in The Good Listener (his life of Helen Bamber), pointed out that as soon as the Conservatives were elected in 1979, horse-trading between the two heads of state, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, began in earnest. Diplomatic ties, damaged under old Labour, were restored in October 1980. ‘Nicholas Ridley at the Foreign Office made no secret of his wish also to resume arms sales,’ Belton wrote. The release of a report on the torture of a young British student, Claire Francis Wilson, was deliberately delayed, ‘in order not to interfere with his [Ridley’s] announcement… ending the ban on arms sales’.
Prince Andrew, the royal most closely associated with golf (and the Sunningdale/Wentworth/Windsor triangulation), would do the state some service, flying helicopters during the Falklands conflict. But the chummy relationship between Britain and Chile would be damaged by Pinochet’s sleepover in Wentworth. What had once been considered, socially, a plumb posting — military attaché (arms rep) at the British Embassy in Santiago — was now a disaster. Retired submarine commanders, instead of being welcomed, fêted, wined and dined, found themselves in purdah at the ragged end of the world.
Winding up St Ann’s Hill, by a spiral path, it became obvious that Kevin was in some discomfort. His blisters had blisters. His eyes were itching. And the leather straps of his rucksack (book bag) were cutting into his armpits. Renchi, who had moved ahead, searching out the chapel (remains of), paused at a gap in the tree line: a beacon had been established, a potential fire-basket to celebrate coronations, Armadas, millennia. Summit linked with summit across England, coast to downland, hill fort to coast. News of invasion would be relayed to the relevant forester.
We are fleas in the fur of Mary Caine’s Dog. The beast is barking at Wentworth. ‘A British camp defends the circle on the dog’s contoured shoulder at St Anne’s Hill, Chertsey,’ she writes. ‘Its steep terraces and woodland walks haunted by a ghostly nun executed for trysting here with her lover… Here the Otherworld begins — the Mysteries of Ceres, Ceredwen, Black Annis.’
Contemplating such possibilities, Renchi stretches out, full-length, on a low walclass="underline" he dreams England. Eyes shut, hands resting on belly, feeling the passage of breath, he lets the orbital miles flow into the green world, the distant lakes. It is important to halt at the right place, switch off, put the system into suspension. Spying, cataloguing, recording give way to leisurely meditation. Kevin likes the sound of that. I warn him not to take his boots off, not yet; he must wait for the pub, a couple of stiff drinks. The socks will have to be cut away with a knife.
The woods are filled with wonders. Abandoned cars are part of the ecosystem. Once you get them off the road, on to Rainham Marshes, the Green Way to Staines, the River Lea, they achieve a posthumous status as sculptural objects. Nature loves alien curves and textures. Bugs root into soft padding. Birds nest. Paint, whatever its original colour, shades towards river-bottom green. Rust predicts autumn. We stopped to admire a Wolseley whose headlamps were owl-eyes and whose side-mirrors had twisted to catch glints in the high canopy. Spiders’ webs glazed missing windscreens with tough lace. A mulch of leafmould, like shredded tobacco, cushioned (insect-arm) wipers.
In a clearing, we met two builders in baseball caps. They said they were working on a round white house, a distant relative of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion. Someone, inspired by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff, had created a late Modernist barreclass="underline" DNA staircases, screen walls and a panorama of Surrey pastoral. The house was hidden, as in a fairy story, and yet its flamboyantly minimalist design shouted: ‘Notice me, write me up.’
Renchi and Kevin were still talking architecture when, on the road to Chertsey, we found a pub (the Golden Grove) where we could settle ourselves in the garden, without making a public spectacle of Kevin’s feet and the rituals that would be needed to keep him mobile. Pints secured (lemonade and orange juice in Renchi’s case), the Golden Grove became the golden bowl. Kevin eases off his boots, abandons the formerly white socks, and stares at forensic evidence of his overambitious hike. I photograph the damage, while Renchi begs a brown plastic tub and does the Jesus thing with Kevin’s wrecked phalanges and metatarsals. Tendons have contracted, skin is raw or puffed into mushroom cushions. The twenty-six bones, a hundred-plus ligaments and thirty-three muscles are outraged by mistreatment. They’ve carried the journalist around town, into the belly of the BBC, on and off trains, why this impetuous vagrancy? My photographs of feet in bowl are like those water-colours in Tate Britain of the deformities of war, insulted flesh stitched together, torn mouths, missing appendages. Kevin’s ankles have their own imprinted tartan, ghost socks. The originals, a pulp of sweat and blood, would fit over a baby’s head. Renchi, prepared for all eventualities, kits Kevin out in spares, hairy red numbers (to hide the leakage of bodily fluids).
Restored, Kevin decides to curtail the excursion and take a train from Chertsey. This is close enough to the Thames to give his day on the road a certain symmetry, river to river. Decision taken, spirits lift. Renchi consults Mary Caine. Chertsey, it seems, is under the titular protection of Sirius. ‘Chertsey, anciently spelt Cerotes, Sirotes, Certesey, recalls both Ceres and Cerberus.’