Clarence Bicknell, from his ‘Entrance to Paradise’, searched for pictures in the rocks. He sketched groups of horned figures: ‘Weapons and implements’. These implements, now interpreted as ‘halberds’, are characteristic of the early metal age in prehistoric Europe. Triangular blades set at a right angle to their shafts: they look like flags marking holes on motorway golf courses. Pin men dancing for joy: Conan Doyle’s The Dancing Men.
More significantly, Bicknell made a rubbing of ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. Here indeed was ‘The Highway to Heaven’ (the dream of a celestial autobahn). Here was the (unacknowledged) inspiration for the work Renchi produced when the M25 walk was completed. As part of a deprogramming process, he picked certain sites along the road as suitable for sand paintings, drawings with vegetable dye. In rehearsal, he sketched his designs in chalk on the road between the London Waste chimneys and Picketts Lock. The full ritual was intended for the tunnels at Epsom. Our orbital circuit was broken down into four vertical lines, like the Paradise ladders; chalk chippings were placed along one margin, small stones from a deleted burial ground along another. Drumming continued throughout the day, as Renchi laboured to complete his painting.
The Marc Atkins double portrait — Clarence and Renchi Bicknell — becomes a triptych with the addition of Clarence’s sketch of a 1909 discovery in the Mediterranean Alps: The Chief of the Tribes. After a day, during which they had endured intermittent heavy showers, Bicknell and his companion, ‘in a state of great excitement’, came upon something like a stone mirror: his own bearded image, thousands of years old, softened by lichen. ‘Le Sorcier’ was the title the French used. Bicknell spoke of’ Devil-dancers or Witch-doctors of savage tribes’. A beard, teeth suggested by a line of dots, intense eyes under a single horizontal bar (eyebrows or a lid to prise open the skull). The ‘horns’ on the head become hands, digits emphasised with chalk by future portraitists, determined to capture a clear representation. A human face. An archetype. As shocking in its immediacy as the mummified body of ‘Otzi the Ice-man’, who was recovered (clothing and weapons intact) from the snowfield on the Italian-Austrian border.
Renchi, in the booklet that collected the paintings from his Michael and Mary Dreaming, the walk to Land’s End, writes of: ‘Son following father/and father following son/a previous time of taller trees/and different animal energies.’ The son smuggles rocks into his father’s rucksack.
Clarence Bicknell travelled to Ceylon at around the time that my great-grandfather, Arthur, was botanising and managing tea plantations. Arthur did not come from a wealthy family. He reveals, in a chapbook (Arthur Sinclair: Planter and Visiting Agent in Ceylon: The Story of his Life and Times as Told by Himself) published in Colombo in 1900, that his parents ‘were descended from an old Jacobite stock, at this time still rather at a discount’. He walked to school from a ‘little farm-house at King Edward, Aberdeenshire’, carrying the day’s ration of peat. He didn’t linger. ‘I ended my schooling and began my education.’
A self-taught plantsman, he was taken up by Sir John Cheape and shipped off to tea estates near Kandy. He had already laid out a garden of his own, which he rose at four a.m. to work. He was a hungry reader. ‘I read indiscriminately every book in my father’s house… I read and re-read with intense delight.’ He walked home from Aberdeen, ‘sitting down by the wayside’ to dip into whatever he had scavenged from the book stalls. Thomas De Quincey ‘fascinated’ him, and was soon established as his favourite author.
From other books by Arthur Sinclair, accounts of his travels, I remember pen and ink sketches of flowers, more detailed, less painterly than Clarence Bicknell’s. There are photographs of plants, Chuncho chiefs in Peru, artefacts, skulls. Arthur, in his dug-out canoe, rifle across lap, is another Victorian beard. Another quirky traveller, roaming the globe, writing up journals, mythologising, making jokes.
Renchi and I won’t be scrambling over the Andes or discovering rare plants. We have to make do with a few shards of broken Roman pottery in a display case at the Clacket Lane Service Station, or the etymology of the woods we are skirting (‘Devil of Kent’).
Pilgrims Lane, when we blunder across it, is still a buzz. A hedger (human — not one of those grinding machines) puts us right; with his hook, he pulls back a curtain of greenery to gesture at a path across the fields. The road to Westerham dips once again under the M25.
Deep in a bramble thicket that erupts from the edge of the road, Renchi makes his discovery. An antique message printed on tin. Not quite ‘La Via Sacra’ or ‘Le Scale del Paradiso’. A plain, shit-brown rectangle with a prancing white horse: KENT. Welcome.
4
Westerham, Kent, doesn’t work: not for pedestrians. Or travellers of any kind. Which is strange, because the siphoning of small change from transients, heritage tourists (with an imperialist bias), is the reason for this long shank of a town’s continued existence. Westerham is shaped like a mantrap, narrow jaws sprung against incursions by the unwary. Primed to snap shut with a satisfying crunch.
The predominant colour is chocolate-brown (river mud, Gault clay, shit). Reasons for stopping, detouring, paying your respects to sanctioned real estate, are promoted at every turn in the road. White lettering on a red-brown field: CHARTWELL, HEVER CASTLE, SQUERRYES COURT, QUEBEC HOUSE, THE HIGH WEALD COUNTRY. In Victorian times, London was an occasional destination, over the horizon. A coach operated between the Grasshopper pub (near St Mary’s Church) and Fleet Street. Citizens of substance, men of business, travelled in — when they had to, when it was strictly necessary. Most of the Westerham populace never moved, before trains and metalled roads, more than ten miles from where they were born.
We look for shade beneath a roadside tree, sumach or medlar, while we figure out the quickest means of escape. And, more importantly, somewhere to eat. Dust-free cars are parked, bumper to bumper, along Croydon Road. That name tells you something about Westerham. If you want to head north, the choice is: Croydon or Biggin Hill. Croydon has become a creature of the depths, a subtopian city-state; constantly reaching out to devour the lesser hilltop developments of South London. Croydon has trams and transplanted Docklands towers. Croydon has company HQs, untargeted terror targets (nobody knows they’re there), towers of glass and steel. Croydon has its own suburbs (which house the street-cred TV personality, former footballer, Ian Wright and his family). So Westerham, Kent’s western outrider, gives its allegiance to Croydon, not London.
There are no shops, not yet. No other walkers. There is nobody for the barechested Renchi (blue bandanna, red socks) to interrogate. That eerie sound — like ice breaking — is the M25. It’s always there, barely audible acoustic footsteps, a soothing whisper; a nuisance we have learnt to love. Westerham, with pretensions to a kind of Cotswold status, ignores the interference. Between red brick houses, in narrow gaps, beside pubs clinging to the rumour that James Wolfe once dropped in for a swift half, you catch the glint of transit: Eddie Stobart and his rivals jingling their petty cash, searching for a pound coin with which to pay the Dartford Tunnel toll.
We don’t have outfits appropriate to the Rendezvous cafe-brasserie (‘french, fresh, friendly’). Renchi, in truth, hasn’t much of an outfit left. The Rendezvous is packed, a whirl of activity, punters being turned away. Flocks of OAP anoraks use the place as a tea room: pot of Darjeeling and a pale slice of something that is as close as the French come to seedcake. Local artists (and dressed the part) compete for space with cardiac-flushed antique dealers (with too many shirt buttons undone), and motor racing investors whose round tables clink with empty bottles, mobiles parked like six-guns. The harassed young women who run the orders are the only people under retirement age. Smoke, noise, conviviality: to counter the compulsory siesta under which the rest of the town yawns.