We’re happy to be heading for the Thames at Dartford. But, even though we’ll be travelling within a few fields of the M25, we are losing its acoustic footprints. The chalk hills, covered in beechwood, will act as a baffle. We have to take the continued presence of the motorway on trust; believing that it won’t let us down. It’ll be there at the finish.
A full moon, analgesic, above a double-camera surveillance pole. Crossed contrails. The pink (of an experimental rabbit’s eye) over Sevenoaks and the Weald. Rain has been promised: hence, my golfing umbrella. I picked it up in Middlesex Street for £3. I hate umbrellas, the way they poke at you on narrow pavements; the look of them, mean when furled, dangerous in action. A downpour drove me to it. This umbrella, brought out for the first time, gave a certain bounce to our Otford survey. It was useful for pointing at fancy brickwork, repelling the natives.
The well of St Thomas à Becket is to be found in private grounds. We prowl the boundaries. Renchi attempts conversation with a dog walker who has acquired the full English dog-walking kit: green wellies, shooting jacket (velvet shoulder-patches), Black Forest hat with optional ear flaps. A monster hound, shaggy and sodden, tracks us, barging into our knees, demanding attention.
The town is asleep and therefore as close as it’s going to come to being outside time. Otford and the Darent Valley connect with remembrances of pre-industrial Europe; poplars, gardens with statues and fountains, vineyards, grey walls topped with red tiles. Low hills in soft light. The villa. Roman traces that haven’t been totally obliterated by road and railway.
The duck pond is listed. And the ducks get a food allowance from the parish council. The greengrocer and the chemist have given up, closed down. Countryside hangs on to anything that can be turned into a postcard, but is uninterested in preserving community (though debating it continually, as a way of keeping out disruptive influences, unsuitable immigrants). It works pretty well if you can afford it; if you shop in the Bluewater quarry.
We touch the walls of buildings to dowse for lost heat. St Bartholomew’s Church, with its sharp flints and whitish clunch, ironstone from the Lower Greensand, material cannibalised from Roman middens, is a geological accretion; an expression of place scratched out of the immediate locality. Visitors moon around, in quest of revelation, expecting the unexpected, the previously unnoticed clue. Pevsner descriptions, lists of physical features, dates, methods of construction, don’t help. Old superstitions stay with us. The church as a fixture in time, a place of compulsory attendance: christened, confirmed, married, buried. Heritaged grass squeaks with forgotten voices, clumsy boots tramping over dead faces.
We have to accept the version written on the board. A detached tower stands for an ecclesiastical palace, gifted by Cranmer to Henry VIII. An outsider, such as the poet/filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, can take a pile of medieval bricks, an arch or a barn, and give them back to us as an energised version of Chaucer. Riffraff and rentboys supplying the faces. The British have too much respect for antiquity to let it live. We need the strings, the madrigals, the explainers. Superstition draws us to these scars; we circle and poke. Bruce Chatwin quotes Werner Herzog: ‘Walking is virtue, tourism deadly sin.’
We’re walking tourists. We pass through landscapes on which we have no claim. We spend money in pubs. We visit the obligatory sights: churches, parks, bunkers, villages with literary or painterly associations. We take photographs. But, alongside the convivial agenda, is a ritual purpose: to exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the Dome, to celebrate the sprawl of London. Historical accuracy is less important, Chatwin asserts on Herzog’s behalf, than ‘authenticity of tone’. The English look ridiculous when they try to do a Kinski, pop-eyed, dirty white suit: the glare of unconsummated narcissism. Marc, who has been known to get his kit off as a performance artist, does his best. Raise your camera and he’ll confront it. But the laugh is just a breath away, the ironic snort.
The Darent is high, fast-flowing after recent rain. Our path is clearly marked. We spot a kingfisher. By tall hedges, through fields and golf courses, we track the river to Shoreham. The young Darent clears debris to work a passage through the chalk. What seems to be a random sequence of twists and turns is no such thing. Rivers, so Kit Hart (of Islington’s Hart Gallery) tells me, demonstrate a ‘fundamental relationship between mathematics and science’. (Kit was quoting from Fermat’s Last Theorem.) The length of a river (as walked, from source to mouth, following every meander) is three times the distance as the crow flies. ‘The ratio is approximately 3.14… the ratio between the circumference of a circle and its diameter.’
Indulging every whim of the Darent, putting in those extra miles, will remind us of the motorway orbit. Whatever we attempt, it will always feel three times as far as we expect. Distance is stretched to achieve a more satisfying sense of time.
It comes as a shock to find Shoreham where it is, so close to London. I suppose, with confused notions of Blake’s Felpham (a suburb of Bognor Regis), I’d always assumed that Palmer’s Shoreham was hidden among the South Downs: that Shoreham was in fact the Sussex Shoreham, Shoreham-by-Sea. Domesticated, after the Bloomsbury style, with a touch of Eric Gill’s community at Ditchling. A morning’s drive away. Shoreham was an exportable fable, an idyll; suspect, fraudulent, magical. Fixed at the equinox.
Nothing of the sort. Shoreham rubs shoulders with the Swanley interchange, with Brands Hatch, Orpington. Shoreham is just a wheel-spin off the M25. Staying on the road, you don’t notice it. It doesn’t register. No theme park, no shopping mall, no imprisoned animals.
Samuel Palmer was more perceptive; as a child, accompanying his father (another Sam), he tramped through Greenwich, Blackheath, Dulwich. Long excursions, hand in hand, by two troubled humans seeking out hinge places, transfiguring experiences. There were no angel trees in Palmer’s Dulwich. The golden light was always in the next field. The Palmers knew the area between Greenwich Park and Dulwich as: ‘the Gate into the World of Vision’.
The bright, sickly child (asthma, bronchitis) who had to be regularly braced at Margate and the restless man (bribed by his family to give up trade and behave like a pensioned gent) wandered for miles, eager to escape the gravity of London. The Valley of Vision was identified — as a moral landscape out of John Bunyan. Raymond Lister, the Palmer biographer, opens his study with a quote from Pilgrim’s Progress.
Yea, I think there was a kind of sympathy between that Valley and him. For I never saw him better in all his pilgrimage than when he was in that Valley.
The orthodox account of Palmer is: precocious child, brief period — in the wake of his meeting with William Blake — of achievement at Shoreham (an Eden of light), marriage, visit to Italy, long decline into production-belt pieties.
There is truth in it, but the conventional picture (visionary succumbing to dreary domesticity) has led to the decline in Palmer’s reputation: he’s tagged as a follower of Blake, a proto-hippie who got religion. But Palmer, as premature psychogeographer, deserves reconsideration. Some of his letters to fellow Ancients, Richmond and Frederick Tatham, are as wild and freewheeling as Neal Cassady. Everything of Palmer’s present, his now, had to be squeezed on to those pages. The Shoreham postman becomes a messenger of fate, waiting to bear away every compulsive communication before its argument can be concluded. The sheets of paper, so his correspondents felt, must have been torn from Palmer’s hands.
He was never prepared, even when his father-in-law John Linnell pressed him, to make an accurate record of natural forms, the scene that stood before him. In his sketchbooks, Palmer allowed forms to become archetypes. He scribbled in the margins, talked to himself: