The old ways, p.25
The Old Ways, page 25
Part of the sense of disengagement that attends Ravilious’s paintings has to do with the images of tracks, prints and paths that he repeatedly used: footprints on snow or in mud, left by unseen pedestrians, walkerless paths that entice the eye and the imagination out of sight, promising events over the horizon. Ravilious was obsessed by tracks: he read deeply in the work of Thomas and he revered Samuel Palmer, who wandered the footpaths around his Kent village by dawn, dusk, night and day, and he absorbed Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track (1927), with its vision of a concealed network of Neolithic trade routes spreading across England and the world. Ravilious’s mentor at the Royal College of Art was Paul Nash – another lover of chalk, another follower of the old ways, another artist of the path.
Ravilious walked the chalk paths of the Downs, and he made art of them. In 1929 he engraved the Wilmington Giant on boxwood, for a zodiacal almanac in which the giant features as Taurus: a large white figure crowned by a full moon. In 1934 he painted his own garden path. In 1935 he painted Chalk Paths, in which three tracks compete to lead the eye away, while a barbed-wire fence snags the gaze. A 1936 canvas records travellers’ caravans stopped by the side of an old road. An undated work, titled Eastleen Road, gazes down a Sussex green way. Dozens more paintings are of paths: glimpsed behind waterwheels, out of house windows, from trains; paths crossing fields, leading along cliff-edges or up to the other great chalk figures of the Downs (the Uffington Horse, the Cerne Abbas Giant). In 1937 he visited Gilbert White’s Selborne in Hampshire, and walked the holloways of which White had written in his third letter to Thomas Pennant. Ravilious’s engraving of a Selborne holloway shows a deep lane, over which the trees are leaning and locking, and the entry to which is guarded by a barn owl in flight. The owl’s head is turned out towards the viewer, its eyes quizzical behind its knight’s visor of feathers.
The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination, and so did the light: falling as white on green, distinctive for its radiance, possessing the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea. If you have walked on the Downs in high summer or high winter, you’ll know that the light also has a peculiar power to flatten out the view – to render scattered objects equidistant. This is the charismatic mirage of the Downs: phenomena appear arranged upon a single tilted plane, through which the paths burrow. In these respects the light of the Downs is kindred with another flattening light, the light of the polar regions, which falls usually at a slant and is similarly fine-grained.
The light and the path were Ravilious’s signature combinations as an artist. Together they create a unique disharmony. He produced scenes that seem suspended almost to the point of stasis, but that also allude to some future or simultaneous action. The effect on the viewer is one of dissonance: the sensation of occupying a space between two worlds, or even two entirely distinct geometric systems at once.
It felt, that day on the Ridgeway, as if we had stepped into a Ravilious canvas. The sense of suspended animation, of action occurring elsewhere. The light levelling the landscape and the path beckoning us through it. Everywhere, the snow was grooved: by the old chalk tracks, by bicycle tyres and tractor wheels, by the lines of our skis and by the prints of dogs, hares, rabbits, pheasants and people. On the declivities we skied past hollow cow-parsley stems and yellowed grass, and we sank into deep drifts around the base of hawthorns, which seemed to grow like crystal: the jag and cross-jag of thorn and black branch against the snow.
Yellow, white, grey, grey-blue: the landscape had been burnt back by the cold to its ashen colours. Here and there were flashes of fire: haw-berries like blood in the hedgerows, the sparks of redwings in flight. Now and then the low sun showed yellow through clouds. Fieldfares clattered in the bushes, plucking haws, throwing their heads back and swallowing them whole at a gulp. Sarsen stones stood about in flocks, with snow on their rounded backs. Buzzards were out in ones and pairs, turning in the sky, looking for the carrion which was more plentiful in such prolonged cold weather. We passed a kestrel hunched on a telegraph post, its head sunk into its shoulders. We passed Bronze Age round barrows and Neolithic long barrows. Two brown hares made an urgent run across a big field, kicking snow from their hind feet. In the canopy of a long thin beech wood, rooks yabbered and called, tossed up into the air and then settled back, as if the wood itself were boiling.
Sometime about mid-afternoon there was a bleak glitter of sun, and shortly afterwards we turned a bend of the Ridgeway and looked across to see, for the first time – in a piece of pure landscape theatre that had not changed for nearly 5,000 years – Silbury Hill rising white in the distance, apparently floating high above the surrounding landscape: another of the flying islands that dot these pages.
For those last short hours of daylight, we moved through a world drained of people and colour. Once, a heron launched itself from low ground to our south, a foldaway construction of struts and canvas, snapping and locking itself into shape just in time to keep airborne, slowing time as it beat away northwards on curved wings.
For most of Ravilious’s life, the Downs satisfied his landscape needs. Especially in winter, when the beech hangers stood out like ink strokes in a watercolour, they embodied his aesthetic ideal: crisp lines, the fall of pale light on pale land. But as the 1930s wore on, he began to desire an elsewhere, an otherworld. Like many Englishmen before and after him, he came to locate that elsewhere in the far north – the dreamed-of land of the Arctic Circle and the midnight sun, of icebergs floating in water black as lacquer, of the aurora borealis, of spines of grey-blue frosted mountains and the year’s last sun shining like foil on the horizon line. Since boyhood, Ravilious had been entranced by the romance of the polar regions. He had read widely in the great books of Arctic exploration and adventure. He collected nineteenth-century editions, maps and images of the far north, including copperplate engravings of the journeys of Barents, Ross and van Heemskerk. The colour white – or if not colour, then tone, or atmosphere, or absence – seems to have possessed a particular power of attraction for him: it was there first in the chalk of the south, and later in the ice of the north.
By the time the Second World War was declared, Ravilious’s boreal obsession had deepened. He was restless to travel north, and his chance to do so came with his appointment in late 1939 as an official war artist, which gave him a rank of acting captain in the Royal Marines, and influence over his postings. So it was that, in the last three years of his life, as Peter Davidson has finely written, ‘the snow and the snow light on bare hills draw [Ravilious] steadily northwards’.
In May 1940 came the news for which Ravilious had longed. He was to sail with HMS Highlander to Norway and across the Arctic Circle. Highlander would be supporting the Allied assault on Narvik. ‘Goodbye Tush,’ he wrote to his wife, Tirzah, ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can but it is all out of my hands as you can see.’
They sailed for days over good seas, up through the latitudes, the day lengths growing as they ploughed on, escorting the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious. Ravilious sat on deck working for hours, or leant on the stern-rail, coatless in the northern sun, watching the wake curdling the sea into cream and green: a white track, a chalk path inviting him to step from the ship’s side and stride out along it, back south, back to Tirzah.
Hard sea battles were fought. Ravilious’s ship was attacked by plane, mines and submarine. But Ravilious barely referred to these dangers in his letters home. The attacks were offstage events. More important to him was that the sun never fell below the horizon. At 70° 30' 00", he painted the midnight sun, poker-orange above a boreal sea so blue it almost expired into black.
The art Ravilious produced during these weeks was perhaps his finest, certainly his strangest. His images are full of action but devoid of people. They possess a lonely watchfulness: Ravilious the sentinel. The silvered bleakness of the Arctic seems to have entered them, infusing them with a stillness. They are at frost point.
His letters, too, assumed a more oneiric tone than usual. The atmosphere was ‘remote and lovely’. When the ship entered fog banks, it was as though they had passed into some ‘unearthly existence’. Terns scooted past, dolphins sculled beside the ship, and once they saw an empty upturned lifeboat. He watched German planes drift over, shiny as sixpences in the high zinc sky, and felt briefly as though he had been transformed into a tube of glass, cylindrical and brittle: the effect something to do with being viewed from above …
When Ravilious returned from 7,500 miles and four weeks at sea, having witnessed deaths and marvels, he found himself changed. The world seemed more spacious to him, and less consequential. The north was still exerting its pull. Within weeks of getting home he was longing to leave again: to Iceland, then Greenland, then Arctic Russia – Novaya Zemlya, perhaps.
But the War Artists’ Advisory Committee asked him to paint the concealment of the White Horse at Uffington, which was being turfed in – millennia after it had been turfed out – to prevent German bombers using it as a landmark or target. They also wanted him to paint the fire engines that had been deputed to spray the chalk roads with black ink, also to prevent them being used as navigation aids by the Luftwaffe.
But then he was posted to Iceland. The timing was far from kind. Tirzah had been hospitalized for an emergency mastectomy, and had returned only a week before Ravilious was due to depart. He should have stayed to care for his family, but he didn’t. He bought Tirzah a copy of his second favourite book, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and cut it in two with a serrated knife, giving half to Tirzah and packing half himself to take away: proof that they would be reunited. He spoke to a friend about the Iceland trip as fulfilling a long-held desire to explore the outer limits of the physical world.
He flew into Iceland on a calm day in late August 1942. The volcanic mountains, viewed from above, looked to him like lunar craters, casting shadows that were dark and striped as leaves. In a Reykjavik market, Ravilious held and almost bought a narwhal horn. He collected flowers and shells to take back home as tokens of the north. From the capital he made a spine-jolting road journey to Kaldadarnes, an Anglo-American airbase on the east coast of the island: breeze-block barracks, a green corrugated-metal roof and a swell of low mountains behind.
He had only been there a night and a day when a report came in of a missing aircraft out of Kaldadarnes, one of the 269 Squadron Coastal Command: a Hudson Mark III that had disappeared off the coast while engaging a U-boat.
At dawn the next morning Ravilious was shaken awake. A search was about to be launched: three more Hudsons were to fly out and sweep the area in which the first plane had disappeared, 300 miles to seaward. Did Ravilious want to fly as observer, paint the mission, possibly the rescue?
Even as the three Hudsons took off, a storm was brewing. They made their search, found nothing and turned for home, their wings bucking in the turbulence. Radio contact became sporadic between the planes, then non-existent.
Only two of the Hudsons landed again at Kaldadarnes. Ravilious’s plane, FH 363, did not. Pilot, navigator, wireless operator, gunner, and an artist who had dreamt as a young boy on the Downs of flying over the northern ice, did not. All five men were lost in a plane looking for a lost plane.
Late in the day, David and I entered a deep winter wood of birch, hazel and beech on the crest of a hilltop. Icicles hung from the branches, and the last light condensed in the blebs. Water in a pool in the wood shone black and thick as lithography ink. We crossed an Anglo-Saxon earthwork, a double dyke that ran east–west. Then we emerged from that high ground and looked down onto the paired summits of Walker’s Hill and Knapp Hill, the two rounded chalk hills that form a gateway through which the Ridgeway passes.
And there on the slopes of Knapp Hill, suddenly and gladdeningly, were people again: scores of tobogganers in gaily coloured coats and scarves. Even from a mile away we could see their reds and blues, bright against the snow, and we could hear the cries of the children and the crunch of the toboggans over old snow. We skied down to the low ground between the hills hushing through the snow, which lay so lightly that it plumed off the tips of our skis. When we reached the gateway, we climbed Walker’s Hill to the long barrow on its summit, whose contours were encased in crisp layers of ice. Twilight: the sky streaked purple and crimson. The tobogganers on the opposite hill yelled and slid and laughed. A boy in a duffel coat ran down the slope with his arms outstretched. Lift is created by the onwards rush of life over the curved wing of the soul.
That unforgettable day held a final surprise. Dark had fallen, and we were driving back in the van. We were only a few miles from the Ridgeway when David pulled out of a side lane onto a fast road. As he did so a large black-pelted animal sloped across the wide snowy verge to our south, moving with the high-shouldered prowl of a big feline, before flowing into the darkness of the hedge. We glimpsed it only for a few seconds. It was far too big for a domestic cat, and had the wrong gait and size for a fox or deer. As David drove off up the road I swung round in my seat to see two great yellow eyes glaring like lamps from the hawthorn and the shadows. ‘That was a panther,’ I said to David. ‘I know, I saw it too,’ he said, as he drove on. All the way home we speculated about that dark shape. Later, we would find that there had been many sightings of big black cats in the Marlborough Downs. I wished that we had pulled over and gone back with torches to examine the ground, searching for pug marks in the snow and mud. And then I thought that perhaps it was better – after crossing that otherworldly landscape on that ancient path – to have not proof or disproof, but instead a certain image of uncertain origin: the fierce light of those two eyes scorching out of the darkness.
14
Flint
Downs storms — The consolations of landscape — Egotism dispersed — Maps of longing & of loss — ‘The hill road wet with rain’ — Double-penned footfalls — Padders, tramps & hobos — Night on Chanctonbury Ring — Haunting & fear — The Devil’s soup & the hairy bikers — The severe Reverend C. A. Johns — Conduplicate, convolute & involute — Tree & bird; root & step — Night on Kingston Down — Dupel & thistledown — Another white horse — The volatility of place — Futile pursuits — Sea-fall at Cuckmere — Glaucous waves — Finding the flints — Inner roads & ghostland.
The long white roads … are a temptation. What quests they propose! They take us away to the thin air of the future or to the underworld of the past.
Edward Thomas (1909)
Footprints in the wet white earth of the path. The ridge of the South Downs I was walking had become a frontier in the landscape, dividing the world into realms of weather, light and colour. Underfoot, the track – of fine chalk, pure enough to write with, pocked by butterscotch flints – was glossy with recent rain. Ahead of me, it ran brightly off over the hills, dipping from sight before looping back up again, softening with distance.
I was walking in a stormlight that made the linseed pulse a hot green, and turned the barely ripened barley fields to red and gold sand. Dark shoals of rooks over the woods, and billows of rain like candle-blacking dropped into water. The Downs are the only high ground in an otherwise flat and low landscape, and this means that, as in the desert or on an ocean, you can sometimes see what weather will reach you hours before it arrives.
For much of that morning I led a charmed life: monsoon-squalls sliding by to east and west. Then, just after noon, a big storm caught me. Yellow sun-flare, dulling to sepia. Rain drilling the earth. The path a river, gathering the water into a torrent that rinsed the chalk white again. A brisk summer hailstorm. Then rain again, so hard and fast that it appeared as cylinders rather than drops, as if I were seeing through reeded glass, and at last sun again and the air repristinated. I sheltered in a copse of ash, oak and high-trunked beeches, and ruefully considered Hippolyte Taine’s pastoral claim that ‘the first music of England’ is to be heard in ‘the fine patter of rain on the oak trees’. That morning, there was nothing musical to the rain. It was military: weather war.
It was the first of many soakings for the day. During each shower the world bleared and wove. After each shower the sun struck back out and the earth steamed and the smells of the land rose up. Sun-blazed rain-scarps trailed off to the south-east, away over the Channel to make landfall on the French coast. I tried to time my miles between storms, moving from cover to cover. Rain-filled hoof-marks and footprints flashed gold, coined by the sun. I felt lifted, glad to be out and walking. Ahead of me lay more days on foot, and the path insinuating eastwards – in the old and innocent sense of the verb, from the Latin insinuare, meaning ‘to bend in subtle windings, to curve’.
I’d left early that day from Winchester, planning to follow the ridge line of the South Downs east for a hundred miles or so until it made sea-fall near Eastbourne, where the chalk dipped down underneath the English Channel. I had walked early-day miles past watercress farms and through hangers beneath whose beeches roiled a flak of loose leaves.
