Downland: part eleven

Ridler’s gallantry – essentially survival with dignity – had earned him decorations and promotion by the end of the war; but neither of these would augment the back pay and pension that he had been demobilised with to ensure him a reasonable standard of living. Before the war, he had lived well until his father’s inheritance had come to an end. The life of a young gentleman had been an expensive one: houses, horses, tailors and travel had all drained his money away. With no further expectations, he was forced to accept the security of a commission as a second lieutenant to avoid humiliation and the pack of pursuing creditors. The same mistakes again would be the end of him. He had been determined to find a way to live where he would be master of his own destiny. Never again would he put his trust in arrogant fools like Townshend. He could not work for those whose privilege, power and incompetence were bare for all to see. He would set out alone. After handing in his army greatcoat and form Z50 at East Grinstead railway station, he had received another pound to supplement his meagre resources. And then he had bought a poultry farm.

Sergeant Terence ‘Shorty’ Short, a fellow traveller who had come through the march to Anatolia with Ridler, had a pair of elderly parents who needed to sell Postern Poultry Farm. Failing to be alerted by Shorty’s unwillingness to take it on himself, Ridler bought it for a song. But he had known nothing of keeping chickens and his heady optimism eventually turned to bitter failure. His fundamental error had been to try to fatten up layers to sell as birds for the table. The quality of their lays deteriorated in the process ,and his bread and butter income from delivering eggs to pubs and restaurants in the River Wandle valley foundered. And this sacrifice did not pay the dividend he had hoped for: never able to afford quite enough feed for the purpose, the fattened birds were little more than adequate at best, scrawny at worst. The long decline was arrested by an outbreak of avian tuberculosis and, after two miserable years, Ridler slaughtered the remaining birds, levelled the chicken sheds and left the land for his creditors to fight over. And then he had done what any level-headed, ex-serviceman, chicken farmer would have done: Ridler ran away to join the circus.

Downland: part ten

Since the end of the Great War, Ridler had struggled: his living had been piecemeal, hand to mouth. But the war had been a terrible time; the guarantees of his peace-time commission – pay, rations and billet – had been replaced by humiliation, death and disease. The Mesopotamia campaign had started with all the expectation and certainty of a British military operation: they had marched in to Basra and Kurna with little loss or opposition and had carried on up the Tigris to garrison the town of Kut-Al-Amara.

In November 1915, General Charles Townshend had then led his troops into battle at Ctesiphon, the last major obstacle before the final march on Baghdad, with confidence. Having witnessed only surrender and desertion from the Turkish forces they had encountered so far, the ferocity of the battle - the casualties, the defeat and retreat - were a shock to Ridler. The British and Indians had lost more than half of their troops and were forced to return to Kut where thousands of Turkish soldiers had besieged the town. For 147 days they resisted the siege before the humiliation of surrender. 147 days of bitter cold, hunger and infection. And then Townshend simply capitulated, surrendered his command and abandoned his men to sit on the side-lines for the remainder of the war: a small island off the coast near Istanbul, use of a yacht, visits from dignitaries. Captivity in luxury was better for Townshend: after the war, when the treatment of his men at the hands of their Ottoman captors became clear, a death in disgrace.

Ridler had felt that treatment but the Indian troops had fared worse and, as they were marched from Kut to Anatolia, they were made to strip to the waist and walk bare-chested. Every village they passed through, people would flock to the roadside to stare at these half-starved Indian troops. Their rib cages pushing bleached bone hard against the paper thinness of their black skin, their pale eyes set deep in dark, emaciated faces and their abject submission to the will of their captors all made them a spectacle. In Aleppo, a guard made one captive dance, whipping at his ankles with a switch. Small boys, laughing with delight, threw pieces of bread. Ridler was spared this humiliation, but he too, had submitted to whatever was required to survive. Half did not see the travelling circus through to its end: 5,000 starved, tortured, beaten to death.

Downland: part four

The village came into sharper focus: the square tower of St. Peter’s church significant above the tree line, the roof of the estate house, a spiral of smoke curling skywards from a gardener’s bonfire. Skirting the buildings of the estate farm on the edge of the village, Ridler felt some apprehension. There was little enough light for him to be indistinguishable but an unknown figure in the village, when all were at hostelry or home, would always arouse suspicion. The first time he had come off the Downs this way, a man had called after him as he passed the pub - Ridler had not stopped - and since then he had cut through the grounds of the estate rather than navigate the final part of the village.

Ridler paused at St. Peter’s. The path to the church was marked by the war memorial. In the weak light, he could still make out the names, those very English names. Backshall, Clouting, Collingham, Notley, Unstead: the fallen of the Great War. Ridler had not fallen; many times he thought he might fall but he had caught himself and had come through physically unscathed. Other names: Cornwall, Loftus from the second war. Ridler had tried to enlist for that one too but although the Consul in New York had been polite and accommodating, Ridler knew that he had not taken him seriously. He looked down the hedge-lined path to the church; he could see no light. At one time, he would have always chanced a visit but he had not been in for a year now, even though he had several times been in the porch, at the door, before turning away at the last thinking better of it. The village was warm, still and quiet; he could see an open-doored cottage across the way but nothing stirred within. Eating in the parlour perhaps; tending their own modest crop at the back after a day of toil at another’s; sleeping in a chair by a window. Ridler coveted the simple pleasures of these simple people but not the narrow confines of their narrow experiences. Those who saw some of the world through the prism of a war were not here now: they did not come back.

He turned again towards the church and headed down the path. Ignoring the door on the village-side of the squat, Norman church, Ridler passed clockwise around the northern end of the building before coming into the porch of the south door. At closer quarters, he had seen some feint light from within as he skirted the building; this did not mean there were occupants. The flickering of votive candles had been common when he had visited the deserted church before. He listened carefully at the door. He could hear nothing. He lifted the latch and eased the heavy oak door. Candles had been lit but, beginning to gutter now, the devotees had long gone.

Downland: part three

Arriving at Firle Beacon, exposed to the full westerly current as it travelled across the landscape to meet the land mass, this was Ridler at his most free. Away from the cell’s dimensions of the caravan, the narrow minds of the village, the puritan judges of a world stiff with conformity, he was alive. The ochre sun, now drowned in the horizon, coloured the very top of the spiralling clouds above him. He discarded his jacket and shirt and - bare-chested, arms spread wide, head thrown back – felt the strong, warm breeze on his stigmatised skin. Below him, the panoramic vista he had grown to rely upon: the wheat-packed fields mapping away from him to the cloud-mirrored ridge of the Weald; the county town of Lewes, cradled in the creases of the surrounding hills; the tied villages, standing firmly at the centre of their feudal estates; and the Tower, that single turret of sturdy split flint that so mocked his own Englishman’s castle. The solid and unchanging landscape of tradition, of England. Ridler, himself born so English, had made himself so foreign; and now he felt connected to this pastoral idyll, this England, but not to its people. He inhaled deep and long through his nose and exhaled loudly and capaciously from his mouth until his breath became first a bellow and then a roar. A roar of affirmation, a roar of freedom, a roar of innocence: he could not be blamed for the way the Writer’s brief stay had ended. Way down in the village of Firle, had anyone looking up been able to see or hear clearly, they would have made out a variegated bestial figurehead on the bow of the Beacon, sailing away in the fading light, proclaiming the clarity of his conscience.

Replacing his jacket and shirt, Ridler draped a scarf over the top of his head and held it in place with a battered, broad-brimmed felt hat he had taken, with the scarf, from his jacket pocket. Tying the scarf under his chin, in such a way that only eyes, nose and mouth were visible, he began the climb down to Firle picking his way carefully down the gradient. He could see the car lights on the Lewes Road, fuller now but still a dull, lazy amber, and a cloud of steam as a train was leaving Glynde station. These – the road and the rail - demarked the two lines he would need to re-cross before he could feel less threatened. When he would be walking in the cool and quiet of the tree-lined lanes that led him home, he would be happy. As he descended, the stiff breeze of the Downs subsided and the flat land rose to meet him.

Downland: part two

Below him, to his right, Ridler could still make out the bulk of the tithe barn at Alciston and the lights from The Rose that were beginning to flicker through the pervading gloom. The thought of sitting, musing, a pint of Tamplin’s on a rough wooden table in front of him, appealed. To gaze out of the propped bar door into the warm summer evening, exchange a nod – perhaps a word – with others as they arrived would be the simplest of pleasures; but the reality would be far from this fantasy. Glances, stares, suspicion, alarm, hostility, anger, violence: walking into the bar of a public house would guarantee a starting point at any of the increments on this scale of reaction. Further away he could see the village of Ripe; in the pub there he might be begrudgingly tolerated – not that he had ever tried to test the idea. Perhaps even in the inn at Chalvington to its east, the response would not escalate beyond the stares; but away from home, even a few paltry miles, would make all the difference. Ridler walked on; surefooted, upright and bareheaded. The local pubs had embraced the Writer when he first came to Downland but his turmoil inside had begun to show on the outside and – like Ridler - he had become a spectacle to be judged.

Nearing the Beacon, Ridler felt a sense of relief: he needed to be out on the Downs, needed to be nearer the sky, be able to feel the air, be able to see the world as far as he could, but he always had a sense that no sooner than he felt free, the counter of confinement tugged at him and he had to return to the fetters he had forged for himself. For over twenty years, he had had to live with the limits of his decision to become a spectacle. He had no regret: he and Gladys had lived well during those years – but a price had to be paid. And he had quickly learned that price. Despite all the attention, the gazes of fascination at the World Fair, there was also opprobrium. In Times Square, he had not seen the man as any different from the amused and opened-mouthed throng who parted as he – literally head and shoulders above them - and Gladys, sightseeing, moved through them. Not different until Ridler felt a smart on the side of his face, felt the droplets of blood on his chin and saw the man, flick-knife hanging lazily, mouthing angry words back at him as he melted into the crowd. Never since had he put himself so close to so many people; and never since had he ventured out without scarf and hat to conceal. Except here - the Downs – where the warmth of the summer air, like balm to a wound, caressed and soothed his skin.

Downland: part one

The Downs. The solemn, swollen hills; the perpetual sward of the south, stretching from Winchester in the west to Eastbourne in the east. Undulating, by turns it slopes and sheers to the sea in the south; the covering of ancient woodland cleared millennia ago, ovine-manicured grassland now dominates. At the eastern edge, its northerly face gazes down onto the villages under its shadow and to the distant settlements of the Weald. The Downs: the grass below, above, the vaulted sky. The Downs. And on a day in June 1958, between its silhouetted escarpment and the orange-tinged archipelago of late evening altocumulus cloud, a tall figure could be seen. Avoiding the main path, occasionally obscured by gorse, it was restlessly heading west, intent on descent before the sun finally set. The open landscape of chalk and grass spread before him, the benign breeze faced him; the intersection of stile-less farmers’ fences his only obstacle. He had seen no others since before he had begun his climb when he crossed the Lewes Road and his form, illuminated in the half-lights of a speeding Morris Oxford, had startled the driver into swerve and skid. More anxious than usual on this day to be off the Downs, Ridler’s object – the Beacon – was still some two miles distant. For the past year, he had avoided the nightwalking that had sustained him during his first seven in Downland. Now, he preferred only the interregnum - dusk and twilight - but the risk of capture in the gaze of others was always present. It had been like this before, but in those years from the summer of 1950 he had found some acceptance and, from it, a freedom. The Writer had changed that a year ago to the day and Ridler had barely understood; but he had resolved to remove the risk of a repetition of the events of that previous June.