The popularity of the Rendezvous is soon explained: look at the competition. Coaching inns with balconies and blackboards offering specials, such as: NO FOOD, REFURBISHMENT. A ‘picturesque “wood clad” pub dating from the 14th century’ and named, in case you miss the point, GENERAL WOLFE (1727–59). The Kings Arms is the High Street’s flagship property: ‘an elegant Georgian Coaching Inn… for a relaxing lunch or a light snack in the bar or Town Jail’. White in appearance, white in soul. We keep walking.
Down at the George and Dragon, we gnaw through some ploughman’s leftovers. Back in 1883, the George boasted of its proximity to the ‘new South Eastern Railway Station’. Westerham still smelt of hops, the brewery flourished. The old ‘posting house’ catered ‘for Gentlemen especially’, offering ‘Pyramids, Pool and the only Public Billiard Room’ in town. Now the sporting spirit has definitively run out, replaced by dedicated afternoon boozing, history like a puddle of ullage. We grind and gum in a microclimate of stale tobacco, spilt stout and clinical depression.
Making conversation, Renchi asked the girl in the papershop (as we stocked up on chocolate bars and water), how far it was to Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s country place. She couldn’t do distance, miles, metres; didn’t understand the concept. ‘Five minutes,’ she said. ‘Where’s your car parked?’ No car. On foot, walking. She looked blank, couldn’t get her mind around it. ‘Five minutes,’ she repeated. ‘Up past the common. Follow the signs.’
Not today. Not if we’re going to make Otford. Save it. Every charity shop in Kent carries a copy (bottom shelf, cardboard box) of the Pergamon Press Churchill and Chartwell by Robin Fedden. Robert Maxwell, as ever, doing his bit to puff Great Men (Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceauşescu). This publication had run through two editions and one revised edition, before the 1974 printing that I acquired in Westerham. It has to be a black propaganda exercise, the dumping of thousands of copies of book ballast — in order to con charity shop vultures into paying £11.80 (two adults, non-concessionary) to visit the place Fedden calls ‘the most important country house in Europe’. Nobody but Maxwell could succeed in flogging a book with nothing but a pink chair on the cover; a pink chair with pink box (or footstool) on a strip of grass by a goldfish pond. An image that is meant, emotively, to spell out: absence. A feeble attempt at invoking the famous Churchill icon — © Life — which turns up here as a frontispiece. The warlord, at ease, seen from behind, pregnant with destiny, hat and a coat (no neck); sitting on a rock contemplating the swimming pool he designed and the lake beyond. It could very easily be a stand-in (as with the famous wartime broadcasts), an actor. But it is an effective summary of the man’s relationship to the land, to Kent. After a good lunch, a morning — in bed — dictating memos, he liked to sit by the pond ‘in a simple garden chair’ feeding ‘fat golden orfe’.
Churchill and Wolfe dominate Westerham; effigies, postcards, memorials in the church. Mementoes and memorabilia designed to tempt us into Quebec House or Chartwell, to remind us of a glorious past that is now largely in the keeping of Americans and Canadians. To move east along the A25, in the direction of Sevenoaks (Brasted, Sundridge), is to progress through an elongated version of Camden Passage, Islington, or the Brighton Lanes: antique shop after antique shop (with, by way of variety, the occasional up-market estate agent). The road is busy and impatient, single file traffic unable to make the adjustment after coming off the motorway. Tourist buses and old folk wrestling with maps. Chartwell, when Churchill motored down, was twenty-five miles from London, from Westminster. These days, as the girl in the newspaper shop so shrewdly recognised, distance has no meaning. Miles only matter to horses and pedestrians. We have to deal in drives measured by the hour. Units of nuisance between pit stops. Road works, accidents, congestion: a geography defined by junction numbers on the M25.
There’s a narrow triangle of ground at the eastern end of this one-street town, a redoubt known as ‘The Green’. It is dominated by two sculptures. They can’t be called art works. They ignore each other, nervous that they might have to defend their position against legions of dead generals. The western effigy, on the higher ground, was erected in 1911; designed by Derwent Wood, heaved into place on an ornamental pedestal of Portland stone. It’s as camp as they come, a Carry On tantrum; weapon raised more in pique than anger. Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey. Major General James Wolfe repels all incomers (aliens, grockles). His sword is up, his three-cornered hat is cocked; his hose clings to slender calves. He’s going to give somebody a fearful slap.
Down in the dumps, ignoring Wolfe’s hysterics, Winston Churchill sags, his back to London. Oscar Nemon’s monument, donated by the people of Yugoslavia in 1969, is set on a limestone block. This bronze looks like a landslide of molten biro caps. It’s oozy, cloacal; a mash of boiled seaweed. Any day now it’s going to collapse, slither from the plinth and clog the drains. The chocolate Churchill knots his fists, sunk in a deep throne; an old man struggling to raise himself. Straining at stool. Near this spot, he received the congratulations of the town. He stood on a cart, his family around him, to acknowledge the cheers. Now he glares, unseeing, across Tower Wood towards Chartwell. The job of these effigies is simple: alert passing trade to heritage properties where they can spend their money.
I returned to Westerham, on the Sunday after my hike with Renchi, with vague notions of retracing my steps, recovering my lost spectacles — and also locating the source of the River Darent. The Darent, anticipating the M25, heads north at Riverhead, and would give us our route, back to the Thames at Dartford. The river rises near Crockham House, in the hills above Westerham, before dropping down through the Hythe beds of the Lower Greensand. A neighbouring spring at Chartwell lent its name to Churchill’s 800-acre estate — which he picked up for £5,000 in 1922.
I did the tour, beginning at Squerryes Court. I was too early for the house, but was able to walk the grounds. Gurgles and slurps. The dark mirror of the lake. The young Darent enjoying a little aristocrat patronage before slumming it in Mick Jagger’s Dartford. Liquid whispers from Wealden clay infiltrate the salt marshes of Crayford and Stone: rumours of another life, big houses and gravel drives. That must be where the adolescent Mick caught the infection, his compulsion to join the nobs, metamorphose into a dandy and a gent.
Squerryes Court, privately owned, lets in temporary guests, respectful trippers. Cash customers from the suburbs, from Surrey. The Warde family (who lived here from 1731) put up an obelisk to the memory of James Wolfe. One of those damp mysterious things abandoned in an English garden — as if waiting to catch the eye of photographer Bill Brandt. A fog of heavy grain, a couple of lines of valetudinarian verse. There to be found, by those who need to find it; found and forgotten.
Wolfe, aged fourteen, was hanging around in Squerryes Court when the royal messenger (redirected from Greenwich) arrived with his commission. The route to martyrdom was preordained: the Heights of Abraham or the descent from the High Weald. Wolfe seemed sickly/heroic — like Nelson — a mode the English have always admired. Wolfe was a green ghost.