The Children's Book

what was hardly a settlement. It took him a little further south, and then he went east again and found he had met up with the Pilgrim’s Way, the old path where the Canterbury Pilgrims had travelled to the shrine of the murdered Thomas a Becket. That pleased him too. He tramped north-east and then followed the Way along the Downs until he came to Charing Hill and Clearmount. The Way then ran along the south side of Frittenfield Woods, at the end of which he turned south-west, seeing a sign that said Digger Farm. From there he went towards Hothfield Common and Hothfield Bogs. This brought him to the railway that ran from Sevenoaks to Maidstone. He scrambled down the cutting, and stood for a moment on the line, between the shining tracks. He heard a train, coming from the north. He thought he could simply stand there, and let it. Then he found himself on the other side, and waited to watch the engine, with its steam, and fiery grit and busy, clattering piston. He remembered all the talk about the end of Stepniak. He could.

He went on, crossing the Weald, south-west. Hothfield, common and bogs. Across the Great Stour river at a place called Ripper’s Cross. The Weald was made of intractable, heavy clay, and was still covered with a mixture of ancient oak woods and gnarled copses of ash and thorn. He had walked most of it, over the years. Indeed all he had ever done with his life was walk about in this ancient bit of England. The Pilgrim’s Way and the bogs reminded him of Bunyan, and the Slough of Despond. He had read that over and over, as a little boy, maybe once every two weeks, living the walking to heaven, not understanding a word of the theology. Walking over this earth was like being in an English story. He had read Puck of Pook’s Hill, which Mr. Kipling had sent with an admiring note to Olive. He had read the Dymchurch Flit, where all the Pharisees, the People of the Hills, streamed over the midnight beach to leave the country which no longer believed in them. He knew—it was the kind of thing he troubled himself to know—that Purchase House was not a religious reference to the redemption of sinners, but an old word for a meeting-place of pucceles, little Pucks. Or maybe, he thought, it was both, the English language works like that. It mixes things up. He was on a kind of pilgrimage through English mud, and English chalk, and ancient English woods.

He didn’t quite ask himself to where. He took signposts to places whose names he liked. He did now have in his head an image of a story. Not more than the skeleton of a story, a walker walking through England. The odd thing was, that he saw it (he always saw stories in his head) only in shades of cream, and white, and silver, a bleached, leached, blanched story, the colour of the skeletons of seaweeds, or indeed, of humans and beasts.

Hoad Wood, Bethersden, Pot Kiln, Further Quarter, Middle Quarter, Arcadia, Bugglesden, Children’s Farm, Knock Farm, Cherry Garden, Maiden Wood, Great Heron Wood, and then, suddenly, he was faced with a line of water he recognised was the Royal Military Canal, built to add to England’s defences against invasion by Napoleon. He was quite suddenly on the edge of the Walland Marsh. The canal ran East-West, inside deep banks. There were dragonflies, and long fat frogs. He walked east along it, crossing it and turning south on a road that ran to Peartree Farm, passing Newchard, down to Rookelands, Blackman-stone, past St. Mary in the Marsh, and on to Old Honeychild. He was now in the marsh proper, criss-crossed by waterways. South-east of Honeychild he crossed the New Sewer. He went between Old Romney and New Romney, over earth that had been steadily thrown in by the workings of the sea, and made habitable for sheep by the digging of dykes. Galdesott, Kemps Hill, Birdskitchen. He skirted Lydd and the military camp with its rifle ranges and ordnance targets, set up on the bleak pebbled forelands. He found a way out of Lydd, across the Denge Marsh, past a place called Boulderwall. The surface of the earth was huge, flat, ripples and ridges of pebbled shingle, with strips of grey-green lichen clinging to the sides protected from the wind. He went across the shingle of the Denge Marsh, between the black wooden huts, the rusty boat machinery, the upturned, beached, fishing boats. He went past the Halfway Bush and the Open Pits, on which seabirds floated and called. He went on, out to the point of Dungeness, beyond the place where the single-track railway line simply ended in pebbles, below the coastguard’s hut.

You have to think about walking on pebbles. Every time you put your feet down, the pebbles impress themselves, hard and recalcitrant, through the soles of your shoes. They slide treacherously in front of you, to your side, you bow and recover yourself, you lean your body forward into the wind, which is usually fierce onto the shore, which takes your hair back over your head, which goes in and through the spiralling channels of your ears, feeling for your brain. Tom liked the pebbles. They were fragments of huge boulders from the cliffs at the edge of England, boulders which had been soft chalk and hard flint, and were now rounded by the water throwing them up and grinding them together. They are all the same, and none of them exactly the same, Tom thought, pleased with this idea, like human beings, innumerable as—was it innumerable as the stars, or innumerable as the sands, and where did it come from? It didn’t matter. This was a satisfactorily hard place. He went on, and climbed over the crest of a high ridge of the pebbles, and heard and saw the sea. This was the end of England. He had come to the end of England.

It was late afternoon. He sat down, still in his theatre-going shoes and coat, both now dusty and clogged with clay. In his head, the white pilgrim sat down on a creamy couch of pebbles.

What now? said Tom to the pilgrim, though he knew the answer.

He would sit until the sun went down.

He examined some pebbles. A broken one with a marbly sheen on its fragmented facet. A pale one that was almost perfectly round. One with a hole—these were, or once were, magic, you could see the unseen world through the hole. It was a lumpy stone, mottled grey with rust-coloured stains and pale, bald patches where the chalk still adhered. Inside the hole was fretted like a beehive, and also chalky. Tom picked it up and looked at the sea through the hole.

The sea at Dungeness is not a placid sea. The pebbles shelve down and down, and the waters of the English Channel come whirling and whistling in, throwing up breakers, crowned with fine spray, that whip back and are sucked back through the pebbles they rattle. The water was noisy, the wind was noisy, the pebbles were noisy. Tom sat in the noise and stared at the waves—the tide was coming in—which were, like the pebbles, all like and unlike each other.

Under the waves is a current like a whirlwind, that sucks and drives, round the point, out into the English Channel.

Tom watched the sun go down, over the land towards Beachy Head, into the Channel.

The stars were indeed innumerable, like sand, like pebbles.

He had tried very hard to exhaust himself and stop thinking, and had not quite, not yet, succeeded.

He did the next thing. He thought in an animal way, puzzled, about his overcoat and shoes. They would muddle it. They would drag. He took them off, and put the shoes on the coat. He didn’t know whether the tide would come in and take them. He didn’t mind what it did.

He started walking again. He walked down the shingle and on, without hesitating, into the waves and the lashing wind, the flying froth and the sinewy down-draft. He was still walking, in his socks, on the pebbles, soaked to the skin, when he slipped, and the wave threw him into the current. He didn’t fight.

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