I live in borrowed time, therefore I see no reason in the world why my heart grows not dark.
A cold wind blows tonight over this desolate island.
Over the hills and dales, over mountain and marsh, down the great roads and little lanes, through the villages and small towns, through the great towns and the cities.
Everywhere it blows through empty streets and desolate houses, rattling the hedgerows and broken windows, drumming on locked doors.
This wind is blowing high in the tower blocks and steeples, down along the river, invading houses and mansions, through the corridors and up the staircases, rustling the faded curtains in bedrooms, over the carpets, up the aisles and down in the crypts, in public places and private, among forgotten secrets, round the armchair, the easy chair, across the kitchen table.
So icy is this wind that it rattles the bones in the graves and sends rats shivering down the sewers.
Fragments of memory eddy past and are lost in the dark. In the gusts yellowing half-forgotten papers whirl old headlines up and over dingy suburban houses, past leaders and obituaries, the debris of inaction, into the void. Thought illuminated briefly by lightning. The rainbows are put out, the crocks of gold lie rusting – forgotten as the fallen trees which strew the fields and dead meadows.
I consider the lives of warriors, how they suddenly left their halls.
Bold and noble leaders,
I shiver and regret my time.
But the wind does not stop for my thoughts. It whips across the flooded gravel pits drumming up waves on their waters that glint hard and metallic in the night, over the shingle, rustling the dead gorse and skeletal bugloss, running in rivulets through the parched grass – while I sit here in the dark holding a candle that throws my divided shadow across the room, and gathers my thoughts to the flame like moths.
I have not moved for many hours. Years, a lifetime, eddy past: one, two, three: into the small hours, the clock chimes. The wind is singing now.
Eternity, eternity
Where will you spend eternity?
Heaven or hell, which shall it be,
Where will you spend eternity?
And then the wind is gone, chasing itself across the shingle to lose itself in the waves which brush past the Ness, throwing up plumes of salt spray which spatter across the windows. Nothing can hide from it. Certainly no man can be wise before he has lived his share of winters in the world.
The wind calls my name, Prophesy.
Long past the creator destroyed this earth, the joyful songs of the people were silent, the ancient works of giants stood desolate.
The wind whirls in the gutters, screams in the telegraph poles.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff,
And I’ll blow your house down.
Time is scattered, the past and the future, the future past and present. Whole lives are erased from the book by the great dictator, the screech of the pen across the page, your name, Prophesy, your name! The wind circles the empty hearth casting a pall of dust, the candle fizzes. Who called this up? Did I?
Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings; the wine halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.
The storm blew itself out by two – before returning at four with a sudden blast, illuminated by one brilliant lightning flash, and no thunder.
The foghorn sounded for half an hour and then all went quiet.
Buffeted in my sleep like a boat in a high sea, I never cross the night without waking. I can’t quite remember when it was different. I slept quite soundly for forty years; then something changed. Perhaps I wake myself in case I die, unconscious, at the low ebb of the night. Bergman’s hour of the wolf.
The next day I can’t remember what passed through my mind. Nothing, perhaps, except a vague unease.
It’s cold tonight; but suddenly I’m up and pissing in the dark. Back in bed the pillows have been pummelled into uncomfortable hillocks, the sheets have parted company with the mattress – I doze off.
In the morning the storm has torn up a mountain of kelp which floats back and forth in the foam at the sea’s edge. The wind is up again, seagulls float ever closer as if I gave off some imperceptible warmth in the cold. I beat the tide which is racing in, and find three stones for the new flower bed. I draw the circle to plant them but retire inside as the rain blows in; settle down at my desk for a cold wet day.
Prospect Cottage, its timbers black with pitch, stands on the shingle at Dungeness. Built eighty years ago at the sea’s edge – one stormy night many years ago waves roared up to the front door threatening to swallow it … Now the sea has retreated leaving bands of shingle. You can see these clearly from the air; they fan out from the lighthouse at the tip of the Ness like contours on a map.
Prospect faces the rising sun across a road sparkling silver with sea mist. One small clump of dark green broom breaks through the flat ochre shingle. Beyond, at the sea’s edge, are silhouetted a jumble of huts and fishing boats, and a brick kutch, long abandoned, which has sunk like a pillbox at a crazy angle; in it, many years ago, the fishermen’s nets were boiled in amber preservative.
There are no walls or fences. My garden’s boundaries are the horizon. In this desolate landscape the silence is only broken by the wind, and the gulls squabbling round the fishermen bringing in the afternoon catch.
There is more sunlight here than anywhere in Britain; this and the constant wind turn the shingle into a stony desert where only the toughest grasses take a hold – paving the way for sage-green sea kale, blue bugloss, red poppy, yellow sedum.
The shingle is home to larks. In the spring I’ve counted as many as a dozen singing high above, lost in a blue sky. Flocks of greenfinches wheel past in spirals, caught in a scurrying breeze. At low tide the sea rolls back to reveal a wide sandbank, on which seabirds vanish like quicksilver as they fly close to the ground. Gulls feed alongside fishermen digging lug. When a winter storm blows up, cormorants skim the waves that roar along the Ness – throwing stones pell-mell along the steep bank.
The view from my kitchen at the back of the house is bounded to the left by the old Dungeness lighthouse, and the iron grey bulk of the nuclear reactor – in front of which dark green broom and gorse, bright with yellow flowers, have formed little islands in the shingle, ending in a scrubby copse of sallow and ash dwarfed and blasted by the gales.
In the middle of the copse is a barren pear tree that has struggled for a century to reach ten feet; underneath this a carpet of violets. Gnarled dog roses guard this secret spot – where on a calm summer day meadow browns and blues congregate in their hundreds, floating past the spires of nettles thick with black tortoiseshell caterpillars.
High above a lone hawk hovers, while far away on the blue horizon the tall medieval tower of Lydd church, the cathedral of the marshes, comes and goes in a heat haze.
My sense of confusion has come to a head, catalysed by my public announcement of the HIV infection. Now I no longer know where the focus is, for myself, or in the minds of my audience. Reaction to me has changed.
There is an element of worship, which worries me. Perhaps I courted it.
In any case I had no choice, I’ve always hated secrets, the canker that destroys; better out in the daylight and be done with it. But if only it were that easy – my whole being has changed; my wild nights on the vodka are now only an aggravating memory, an itch before turning in. Two years have passed with a few desultory nights out. Even with safer sex I’ve felt the life of my partner was in my hands. Hardly the cue for a night of abandonment. I’ve come a long way in accepting the restraint. But I dream of an unlikely old age as a hairy satyr.
This lament is not borne out by my state of mind; because apart from the nagging past – film, sex and London – I have never been happier than last week. I look up and see the deep azure sea outside my window in the February sun, and today I saw my first bumble bee. Planted lavender and clumps of red-hot poker.
I waited a lifetime to build my garden,
I built my garden with the colours of healing,
On the sepia shingle at Dungeness.
I planted a rose and then an elder,
Lavender, sage, and Crambe maritima,
Lovage, parsley, santolina,
Hore hound, fennel, mint and rue.
Here was a garden to soothe the mind,
A garden of circles and wooden henges,
Circles of stone, and sea defences.
And then I added the rust brown scrap,
A float, a malin and old tank trap.
Dig in your soul with the compost from Lydd,
Cuttings, divisions are placed in frames,
Protected from rabbits with neat wood cones.
My garden sings with the winds in winter.
Braving the salt which sails in plumes,
From the rolling breakers that gnaw the shingle.
No Hortus Conclusus, my seaside garden.
With poet’s sleeping and dreaming of daisies.
I’m wide awake on this Sunday morning.
All the colours are present in this new garden.
Purple iris, imperial sceptre;
Green of the buds breaking on elder;
Browns of the humus, and ochre grasses;
Yellows in August on Helichrysum,
That turns in September to orange and brown;
Blue of the bugloss, and self-sown cornflower;
Blue of the sage and winter hyacinth;
Pink and white roses blowing in June;
And the scarlet rosehips, fiery in winter;
The bitter sloes to make sweet gin.
Brambles in autumn,
And gorse in the spring.
For two months after moving here I spent hours each day picking up fragments of countless smashed bottles, china plates, pieces of rusty metal. There was a bike, cooking pots, even an old bedstead. Rubbish had been scattered over the whole landscape. Each day I thought I had got to the end of the task only to find the shingle had thrown up another crop overnight.
Sunny days were the best for clearing up, as the glass and pottery glinted. I buried the lot on the site of an old bonfire at the bottom of the garden in a large mound, which I covered with the clumps of grass I dug out when I built the shingle garden.
This landscape without visible boundaries is yet jealous of its privacy. Wandering across it, unhindered by fence or hedge, you stumble across piles of rubbish. Maybe that old car still belongs to someone. Who owns the corrugated hut blown sideways at the seashore? Its workbench is strewn with pots of rusting nails, spanners, rasps, an old vice, anchors, and coils of wire – a haven for ghostly ancestors to shelter from a brutish December easterly.
Time and tide have shipwrecked a huge tree, whose gnarled roots, bleached and bony, still grasp the rocks torn up with it. Who sat on those old canvas chairs, warped by the passing seasons, carefully placed alongside each other waiting for their owner’s return?
I walk along the seashore each day, and it guards its secrets. Who plunged these anchors into their shingly graves? This rusting shadow on the ground was once somebody’s bed. Old winches and hawsers, graves of toil and memories of angry seas – dissolving.
The rain and fine warm weather have quickened the landscape – brought the saturated spring colours early. The dead of winter is passed. Today Dungeness glowed under a pewter sky – shimmering emeralds, arsenic, sap, sage and verdigris greens washed bright, moss in little islands set off against pink pebbles, glowing yellow banks of gorse, the deep russet of dead bracken, and pale ochre of reeds in clumps set against the willow spinney – a deep burgundy, with silvery catkins and fans of ochre yellow stamens fringed with the slightest hint of lime green of newly burst leaves.
This symphony of colour I have seen in no other landscape. Dungeness is a premonition of the far North, a landscape Southerners might think drear and monotonous, which sings like the birch woods in Sibelius’ music.
From my home I can see the sun clamber out of a misty sea. It wakes me through the bedroom window and then stays with me all day. There are no trees or hills to hide it. When it sets over the flatlands in the west I sit and watch it on a throne-like chair that I rescued from a rubbish dump. I never miss the setting sun, however cold the weather.
Tonight it hangs huge and scarlet after a day of dark clouds. It appears for a few brief minutes, a perfect circle before disappearing – then the darkness comes rushing across the sky to embrace the inky timbers of Prospect Cottage; but before the light is extinguished the house reflects gold, or, as this evening, blazes ruby, its panes of glass a dazzling scarlet. At this moment so red is the light all the greens turn black as pitch, the gorse and broom like jet-black sea anemones, a vast and sombre silhouette.
The heavy rain has left sheets of water reflecting the grey sky lying on the sharp green of the spring fields. All along the rail embankment to Ashford the buds are breaking on the hawthorn bushes. There are drifts of primroses everywhere.
It’s a cold windy day; a drizzle blankets the view, stinging the eyes. Nevertheless a week’s absence has brought the garden on. A quick look showed the irises have grown inches and a second helping of daffodils are unfolding in the broom. The roses are all in bud and are coping with the cold winds.
At the end of the garden the dwarf sloe bushes have blossomed; and the woods along the Long Pits shimmer with silver pussy willow. The Pits are two flooded gravel quarries – there is a pumping station in case anything goes wrong with the nuclear power station’s cooling system.
Deep in the middle of the woods, in the most secret glade, primroses are blooming, the only ones I have found; but there are carpets of violets almost hidden by their bright green leaves.
The unobservant could walk by them without noticing as the leaves and flowers create an almost perfect camouflage, the elusive purple vanishing in the green.
As a nine-year-old on the cliffs at Hordle I discovered a bank of sweet violets and used to creep through the hedge that enclosed the school playing field and lie in the sun dreaming. What did I dream in my violet youth?
The violet held a secret.
Along the hedgerow that ran down to the cliffs at Hordle deep purple violets grew – perhaps no more than a dozen plants. I stumbled across them late one sunny March afternoon as I came up the cliff path from the sea. They were hidden in a small recess. I stood for some moments dazzled by them.
Day after day I returned from the dull regimental existence of an English boarding school to my secret garden – the first of many that blossomed in my dreams. It was here that I brought him, sworn to secrecy, and then watched him slip out of his grey flannel suit and lie naked in the spring sunlight. Here our hands first touched; then I pulled down my trousers and lay beside him. Bliss that he turned and lay naked on his stomach, laughing as my hand ran down his back and disappeared into the warm darkness between his thighs. He called it ‘the lovely feeling’ and returned the next day, inviting me into his bed that night.
Obsessive violets drawing the evening shadows to themselves, our fingers touching in the purple.
Term ended. I bought myself violets from the florist’s and put them by my bedside. My grandmother disapproved of flowers in the bedroom, said they corrupted the air. Violets, she said, were the flower of death.
But the violet, I discovered, was third in the trinity of symbolic flowers, flower of purity,
Whose virtue neither the heat of the sun melted away,
Neither the rain has washed and driven away.
The violet, Nothing behind the best for smelling sweetly, a thousand more will provoke your content.
A new orchard and garden was mine.
That summer, when the wheat had grown waist high, we carved a secret path from the violet grove into the centre of the field, and lay there chewing the unformed seeds, rubbing ourselves all over each other’s bronzed and salty bodies, such was our happy garden state.
The wind roared through the night with but brief moments of calm – early this morning the whole landscape, sea and sky blended into a glowering ochre – even the lark’s song was blown away. My roses are now sadly scorched and the fennel quite dead.
In the house the seeds sprout: Californian poppy, pennyroyal and chives have germinated. This afternoon a misty sun gave some respite but was quickly drawn behind a grey gloom that loomed out of the west.
At tea I walked a mile along the shore, skirting heavy leaden waves. Returned home tired, breathless and drenched with salt. Tracking back I noticed dandelions and dead-nettles growing in the shadow of a broken-backed fisherman’s hut. The pitch-black timbers of Prospect Cottage, with its bright yellow windows, are silhouetted against banks of gorse ablaze with golden flowers.
When I came to Dungeness in the mid-eighties, I had no thought of building a garden. It looked impossible: shingle with no soil supported a sparse vegetation. Outside the front door a bed had been built – a rockery of broken bricks and concrete: it fitted well. One day, walking on the beach at low tide, I noticed a magnificent flint. I brought it back and pulled out one of the bricks. Soon I had replaced all the rubble with flints. They were hard to find, but after a storm a few more would appear. The bed looked great, like dragon’s teeth – white and grey. My journey to the sea each morning had purpose.
I decided to stop there; after all, the bleakness of Prospect Cottage was what had made me fall in love with it. At the back I planted a dog rose. Then I found a curious piece of driftwood and used this, and one of the necklaces of holey stones on the wall, to stake the rose.
The garden had begun.
I saw it as a therapy and a pharmacopoeia.
Grey, cool morning, the ochre shingle and sea that is swallowed in the mist. I’m having difficulty eating, everything tastes terrible. I was sick in the night but slept like a log, up just before six. I’m very weak as I had no supper last night.
I love this grey weather – the sunlight attacks me. With my gold pen, the little diary, Mr Wobble. I’ve made myself a bowl of porridge and eaten an orange. The garden welcomes the day. An exquisite tulip, red and yellow and frilly, has popped up in the wallflowers, which are spectacular this year.
I walked down to the sea, my stomach rumbling like the machine-gun fire on Lydd range. A wide expanse of sand, deserted except for two men catching shrimp and another digging for lug. It’s wonderful, a day alone, looking after myself quite successfully.
The rain wept through the night, quietened the grumbling shingle, stilled me into sleep. In the distance the sea roared, churning the ochrous sandbanks. The shoreline had changed, as if a giant hand had raked the shingle, smoothing out the small coves, grading the dips and hollows into a perfect straight line. At the base of the bank a fast-moving river had formed. No stones were left to build the mazes and labyrinths of my garden.
The rain fell through the small hours. Dreamt of soldiers: I was reluctant to wear the smart uniform. The handsomest I glimpsed high above me on the scaffolding around some marble ruin. Stopped, held my breath for his beauty. He slipped out of his uniform and, carefully folding it, placed it at the foot of my bed. A rush of cool air as he slid beneath the sheets. He dared not wake me as he knew I would disappear – I was his dream.
My elder tree died in the night, burnt black by the salt spray …
Bour tree, bour tree, crooked rong
Never straight and never strong
Ever bush and never tree
Since our Lord was nailed on thee
A great pool of water formed on the path, so that as he left the traveller saw his face reflected. He smiled and called back.
The day started with two brief showers. A cold breeze, but the sun came back, and stayed. Driving to Rye we noticed banks of alexanders, bright green with creamy yellow flowers, at the kerbside. At the gravel pits we counted a flock of over thirty swans grazing amongst the sheep.
All the way the gardens were bright with spring flowers, particularly marigolds, which run riot …
Back home I walked along the deserted beach past the power station. The west side of the Ness has a different vegetation. It’s flat. There are patches of moss, islands of dead broom, thrift and an abundance of foxgloves. At the sea’s edge there is horned poppy, but little if any sea kale.
Further past the pylons there is a golden island of gorse. Here, even in the cold wind, the air is scented. Gorse has a delicate herbal perfume not unlike rue. In the right weather conditions the whole Ness smells of it.
There is a passage into the largest clump, a huge area a hundred yards or more in diameter; deep inside, a golden light and a heady perfume. The bushes seem ancient – serpentine gnarled trunks, as if wrung ferociously in an easterly gale. Many of them, long dead, form a carpet like a writhing snake pit.
The great bushes are about ten feet high, very luxuriant, and the warm winter has produced the most beautiful blossom.
This evening the silence in this grove was truly golden. It is a beautiful thought that Pliny says gorse was used to catch the specks of gold from the gravel that prospectors panned.
The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end. A time that does not cleave the day with rush hours, lunch breaks, the last bus home. As you walk in the garden you pass into this time – the moment of entering can never be remembered. Around you the landscape lies transfigured. Here is the Amen beyond the prayer.
Dante, at the beginning of his journey back along the great antique spiral, entered this realm in a dark wood.
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Ché la diritta via era smarrita
A hallucinatory dusk, washed with colours to drive Monet to suicide. At sunset the brightest sickle moon appeared in a gentle blue sky; minute by minute gathering in intensity it stayed until just before midnight.
Night clear as a bell – the blue passed through violet with strands of rose and old gold to become a deep indigo. So etched were the moon and stars they seemed to have been cut out by a child to decorate a crib.
The night sky here is a riot that outshines the brightest lights of Piccadilly; the stars have the intensity of jewels. So flat is the Ness that those stars that lie at the horizon touch your very feet and the moon tips the waves with silver.
The nuclear power station is a great ocean liner moored in the firmament, ablaze with light: white, yellow, ruby. Whilst round the bay the lights stretch from Folkestone to Dover. High above, jet liners from the south flash silent in the stars. On these awesome nights, reduced to silence, I walk across the Ness.
Never in my many sleepless nights have I witnessed a spectacle like this. Not the antique bells of the flocks moving up a Sardinian hillside, the barking of the dogs and the sharp cries of the shepherd boys, nor moonlit nights sailing the Aegean, nor the scented nights and fireflies of Fire Island, smashed glass star-strewn through the piers along the Hudson – nothing can quite equal this.
The orchestra has struck up the music of the spheres, the spectral dancers on the fated liner whirl you off your feet till you feel the great globe move. Light-hearted laughter. Here man has invaded the heavens; but the moon, not to be usurped, shines sickle bright, gathering in our souls.