He walked about the village, alone, talking to himself, gesturing violently; a care-in-the-community aristo who brooded on cement overcoats for patching wounds in lightning-struck trees. The sort of free-associating, lateral-thinking boffin who might well have conceived of an orbital motorway — before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Before television existed to feather his pension.
My slanted, out-of-focus church tower (St Botolph’s) is a homage to Stanhope. We have to conjure some human presence to revive this latest empty village, this evening set. We’re in the claw of the motorway, the volute of Junction 5. From the road, motorists barely notice the hills, parks, spires: Samuel Palmer quotations. They have no sense of what it is to be in the village of Chevening at twilight; the golds and the greens, the avenue alongside the burying ground. Such (oppressive) tranquillity can only be achieved by taking land into the custodianship of the MOD, the National Trust, an exclusive golf course. The Pilgrims Way, a clear path from Titsey to Otford, suffers from indignities inflicted by private landlords and estate managers.
Closing on the M25, by Lime Pit Lane, we pass Morant’s Court Farm. This was where London carters, coming out of town through Bromley, dropped Samuel Palmer’s visitors: the Ancients, John Linnell, William and Catherine Blake. Palmer would send out a boy to meet them, guide them in, by just the way we were walking. Linnell, notoriously careful with his cash, tried to arrange his own transport on carts carrying furniture or farm produce. In 1829, unwell, in need of recuperation, revival of spirits, he arrived with George Richmond at Morant’s Court Hilclass="underline" to be greeted by ‘a strangely dressed figure with a wheelbarrow’. He was trundled away, oblivious to the remarks of coachman and passengers, towards the village of Shoreham.
The delusion persists: the Valley of Vision, Earthly Paradise, is a one-day walk from London (Charing Cross or Millennium Dome, according to taste). A few hours, drudging through industrial dereliction, suburbs, captured villages, will carry the walker into Arcadia. Or, at worst, the town dweller’s version of it. The dream. Linnell, broken in health, vexed by his large family, wrote to Palmer: ‘I have found so much benefit from my short visit to your valley… I Dream of being there every night almost and when I wake it is some time before I recollect that I am at Bayswater.’
Sleep channels open. Lost highways matted with grass. City life is made tolerable by the knowledge that a single day’s travel will deposit you in this bowl of tranquillity. Waltham Abbey, Shoreham, the Lea and Darent Valleys: paradise reservations. So it seemed. So the Victorian artists (craftsmen, seekers) insisted: selective vision. Varnished and glowing; red and gold and green. William Blake’s methods adapted to piety and sentiment. Rick burning, trade unionism, Luddite outrages: such manifestations of rural discontent were denounced. The Valley of Vision was a Tuscany for weekend runaways in search of the Simple Life (i.e. cheap farmhouse lodgings, cider, music, the romance of hop picking). Palmer loved September. He was always trying to persuade his mates to come down for the hop season; so picturesque, autumnal — exclusive.
The forensic sharpness of Linnell, Palmer — and, in due course, the Pre-Raphaelites — is contradicted by the evidence of my out-of-focus camera. The motorway really could be water. When Blake made his only visit to Shoreham, in a stage wagon (like a pioneer trekking to the American West), drawn by a team of horses, he didn’t appear as outlandish as the Ancients — who wandered the countryside declaiming from Macbeth and talking talking talking. Blake settled in a smoky chimney-corner with his churchwarden pipe, to discuss (with Palmer’s rackety, bookseller father) what they called ‘the traverse of sympathy’.
What should have been our golden road, our ‘traverse of sympathy’, carrying us outside the M25 and down to Otford, was a long-shadowed helclass="underline" Palmer’s sticky nocturnes invaded by Robert Crumb. Ugly motors eager to do damage. Rage pods caught between hedges. Better to head off, dodging oncoming traffic in the fast lane of the motorway, than stick with the Pilgrims Way. It’s a rat run, the revenge of the commuters. Deserted villages are coming to life: it’s madness, so we’re told, twice a day. And death-in-life the rest of the time. Lights on, blue TV windows, dogs to walk.
We manage to get off the road — which has no verge — and into the fields, the heavy earth; but we’re soon returned. There is no other route. Every third car is a red Jag: either they’ve been watching too many episodes of Morse, or they want to hide the roadkill on the paintwork. Otford, with its quaint High Street, its proudly timbered survivors, its pond and Tudor ruins, is notable, so far as we’re concerned, for one feature: the railway station.
Here Offa fought a great battle with the Men of Kent. He has my sympathies. A few more miles of the Pilgrims Way (twinned with Brands Hatch) and I’d be ready for Linnell’s wheelbarrow. It’s been a long haul, but we’ve made it to the Darent Valley; now we can head north, back to the Thames.
Our train journeys (reverse commuting) are always unreal. People heading into London are dressed for action, talking compulsively (if in company), unable to sit still if travelling alone. We’re slumped, dirty, silent: if we look out of the window at the flashing suburbs, it feels as if we’re cheating. Train travel is a film for which we haven’t bought a ticket. Otefort. Otta’s ford. The otter is one of the ‘clean’ animals of Zoroastrianism; which, with the dog, it is a great sin to kill. Put aside that grim final hour on the road. Let it be. We’ll be back before Palmer’s hop season is over.
6
We had been standing for ever, outside the station at Otford, the group of us. A hard moon pinging up and down like a table-tennis ball dancing on a fountain. Day/night, day/night: to the end of time. The death of the cosmos in William Hope Hodgson’s Wellsian fantasy, The House on the Borderland.
We posed for photographs beside the fence: WE’RE WORKING ON YOUR STATION/RAILTRACK. We were a self-conscious restatement of Samuel Palmer’s gang, the Shoreham Ancients; city folk up for a ramble. Too loud. Too early. Too many.
Time was squeezing, closing us down: 27 September 1999. We had three months — three walks? — to make it back to Waltham Abbey and down the Lea Valley to the Millennium Dome. Before the Big Night.
The Darent Valley brought them out of their pits: Kevin Jackson (who had been in strict training, jogging up library steps, marching to the bar) and Marc Atkins, loping towards the ticket machine at London Bridge, at the finely calculated last moment; the depth of stubble on his cranium precisely duplicating that on his chin. Kevin’s leather jacket, which dazzled the payroll boys in the station cafe at Staines, has contracted leprosy. It’s been on manoeuvres. It may, unilaterally, have invaded somewhere hot and dusty. Kevin grins, blinks. Hands in pockets (baggy tracksuit trousers). Trainers instead of boots. Big hair, head on the tilt. ‘Moose’, his friend Peter Carpenter calls him. I can see it, the powerful head as a trophy: nailed to the wall. He’s serious about this walk, serious about cutting back on the reference books. He’s here to be here. To pick up camera tips from Marc.