The summer is over. The corn harvested. The fields are ploughed. The ploughman wears chocolate brown corduroy. Brown is the colour of riches. The man who owns acres is a rich man, both in pocket and hopefully in soul. For the soul is deep … a peaceful brown. However much you possess in life, even if your land stretches beyond the horizon, in death you will end up with six foot.
The woods and hedgerows turn the innumerable shades of brown from yellow to red. I ran back and forth in the dying light of October; catching the gold-brown leaves as they fell from the chestnut trees before they touched the earth and were swept up into the bonfire. Each leaf caught in the air brought you a lucky day. They floated slowly in spirals, as we threw sticks for the conkers, which we warmed in the oven till they were as hard as stone, then fought each other bruising our knuckles.
Brown is a slow colour. It takes its time. It is the colour of winter. It is also a colour of hope, for we know it will not be blanketed by icy snow for ever.
The sisters of Perpetual Indulgence all here for the anniversary of my sainting, with a congregation of sixty. We built the altar with a large teddy bear, a first birthday cake and a bubble bath duck. Simon Sebastian looking tremendous with a silver nose piercing, which looks like an upturned Dali moustache. I was given a very beautiful sculpture made from a Portuguese sardine tin – of an articulated figure like Ned Kelly. The sun shone and it was a good deal warmer than last year. My good deeds were read out and my gorgeous nose praised – it was all very affecting. I know I’m not to take this too seriously but my feelings were rather emotional. What miracles have taken place? I think the best is that we are all still here.
It rained very hard during the night; dawn came with little light, grey and suddenly cold. Dungeness quiet and deserted except for the whine of a plane somewhere above the clouds and the cries of seagulls at the sea’s edge. A migraine hovered over my left eye but after a bath and breakfast of toast and sweet grapefruit it retreated. I tied up the pyramids which protect the gorse from the rabbits. Why should rabbits take such a liking to my spiky cuttings? There is little out now, just nasturtiums and Californian poppies, the blue-green sea cabbages are beginning to shed leaves and the scarlet hips on the roses have turned a deeper red.
Along the beach I find more metal chains to fix the sempervivums on the roof. It is very desolate: a pile of railway sleepers marks the passage of a boat into the water, but the boat is nowhere to be seen in the grey mists that hug the water.
How did my friends cross the cobalt river, with what did they pay the ferryman? As they set out for the indigo shore under this jet-black sky – some died on their feet with a backward glance. Did they see Death with the hell hounds pulling a dark chariot, bruised blue-black, growing dark in the absence of light, did they hear the blast of trumpets?
David ran home panicked on the train from Waterloo, brought back exhausted and unconscious to die that night. Terry who mumbled incoherently into his incontinent tears. Others faded like flowers cut by the scythe of the Blue Bearded Reaper, parched as the waters of life receded. Howard turned slowly to stone, petrified day by day, his mind imprisoned in a concrete fortress until all we could hear were his groans on the telephone circling the globe.
A wild storm blew in during the night, rattling the corrugated roof, buffeting the house in fits and starts, a high sea running down the channel with a huge tanker sending up plumes of white spray like a rock … I’m glad I’m awake and it’s light – at night I’m prey to fears and can never sleep with a gale blowing after the hurricane that huffed and puffed like the big bad wolf at the door.
The broom is burnt black with the salt, as are the marigolds, even the red hips are falling from the dog rose, the sea kale are dying back, but the artichoke looks set to defy the winter …
I live in a twilight here from day to day, neither earth nor heaven, the pain circles month after month breaking you down.
HB says he would give anything to give me a day free from this and says if we could swap bodies, and I promised to look after his, he would let me borrow it, but the reality of a sunny day might drive me insane and enduring this would kill him.
At first, people thought I was building a garden for magical purposes – a white witch out to get the nuclear power station. It did have magic – the magic of surprise, the treasure hunt. A garden is a treasure hunt, the plants the paperchase.
I invest my stones with the power of those at Avebury. I have read all the mystical books about ley-lines and circles – I built the circles with this behind my mind. The circles make the garden perfect – in winter they take over from the flowers. There was magic and hard work in finding the coloured stones for the front: white, difficult; grey, less so; red, very rare.
Some of the flints are over a foot high: these are the central hub; some are grey, a very few white and a warm brown, the others mottled white and grey. The bricks, washed smooth by the tide, bring a jolly flash of red.
The garden is full of metal: rusty metal corkscrew clumps, anchors from the beach, twisted metal, an old table-top with a hole for the umbrella, an old window, chains which form circles round the plants. All this disappears in the burgeoning spring. The twisted grimace of the wartime mines, an arch, a hook, a plummet, a line, a shellcase – warlike once; a chain that has rusted to form a snake by the front door, more chimes made of triangles of rusty iron; all this – and the float that looks like an exotic fruit – introduces a warm brown which contrasts nicely with the shingle.
Red. Prime colour. Red of my childhood. Blue and green were always there in the sky and woodland unnoticed. Red first shouted at me from a bed of pelargoniums in the courtyard of Villa Zuassa. I was four. This red had no boundary, was not contained. These red flowers stretched to the horizon.
Red protects itself. No colour is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum.
Red adapts the eye for the dark. Infra-red.
In the old garden red had a smell, as I brushed the leaves of the zonal pelargonium, scarlet filled my nostrils. I have called the plant formal pelargonium rather than geranium, as geranium conjures a dirty pink. The scarlet of Paul Crampel is the perfect scarlet. The scarlet of flower beds; civic, municipal, public red, reflected in the jolly red buses that bring a touch of joy to the dank grey streets.
I’m four again. Zonal pelargoniums light up my eyes. There I am picking huge bunches of them in the mind’s eye of Dad’s movie.
I am sitting here writing this in a bright red T-shirt from Marks and Spencer. I shut my eyes. In the dark, I can remember the red, but I cannot see it.
My red pelargoniums, the colour of flaming June, have never died. Each autumn I take cuttings, and though they are conned to a few flowerpots, when I look at them I see the past. Other colours change. The grass is not the green of my youth. Nor the blue of the Italian sky. They are in flux. But the red is constant. In the evolution of colour red stops.
Childhood flowers, dew-bowed peonies, dark red, along the paths at Curry Malet. The ivy stencil veins of the crocus purple and white, stamens yellow for painting. The buddleia covered with tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock and humming-bird hawks. Purple mulberry – should you eat it? Scarlet geraniums, jasmine, scent of the night stock, Aloe variegata, the camellia – exotic in February; wisteria on old stone walls, wallflowers – wild and draught-defying – balsam poplars brown purple; celandine with yellow brimstone flashing across the lawn.
Dried chincherinchees sent across the world to bloom at Christmas. Güta, the Christmas tree ablaze with candles. Petunias, stock, lupins in school gardens – mysterious spires. Privet and lime. Moth-hunting in the bathroom deep in the night: ermine and emerald. Drinkers; mysterious hawk moths; the multicoloured lackey; puss moth caterpillars on the cliffside with forked devil’s tails; goat moths thick as your finger; all the wild meadows now long vanished.
Syringa in the vases. A cream white rose climbing through the old apples. Gathering worts in Holford. The great monastic poplars by the stream.
At Kilve: fossils grey on the muddy reefs of the beach. The wind, the great yew; bulrushes in the moat; tall Lombardy poplars.
Cowparsley peashooters, ivy ammunition, smell of cowparsley. Stolen carrots and radish. Cress in the bathroom. Eating the ripening corn in a den carved in the fields. Clove-scented white ragged pinks along the borders. Shy aquilegia, wild in the woods. Walking on air high above in the trees.
My cacti gardens. Beans for salting: scarlet, french and broad. Never a cauliflower. Spinach, radish and Tom Thumb lettuce.
All this I remember at 12:30 after a night sweat.
Restless night. Fell asleep at dawn as the sun cast a rosy glow into this room. Across the marshes a full moon, white in a pale blue sky.
My fever has brought a deep, almost comforting lethargy. Spring remarked yesterday that I was unusually calm – it seems ridiculous to worry.
Four years ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, just made a trip to the doctor and come away with a prescription. Now I will myself to get better without the aid of antibiotics, feel almost ashamed of pottering off to the Kobler centre to take up valuable time.
I refuse to believe in my mortality, or the statistics which hedge the modern world about like the briar that walled in the sleeping princess. I have conducted my whole life without fitting in, so why should I panic now and fit into statistics?
When the doctor first told me I was HIV positive, I think she was more upset than me. It didn’t sink in at first – that took weeks. I thought: this is not true, then I realised the enormity. I had been pushed into yet another corner, this time for keeps. It quickly became a way of life. When the sun shone it became unbearable. I didn’t say anything, I had decided to be stoic.
This was a chance to be grown-up. Though I thought I ought to be crying. I walked down Charing Cross Road in the sunlight, everyone was so blissfully unaware. The sun is still shining.
The perception that knowing you’re dying makes you feel more alive is an error. I’m less alive. There’s less life to lead. I can’t give 100% attention to anything – part of me is thinking about my health.
Prospect Cottage is the last of a long line of ‘escape houses’ I started building as a child at the end of the garden: grass houses of fragrant mowings that slowly turned brown and sour; sandcastles; a turf hut, hardly big enough to turn around in; another of scrap metal and twigs, marooned on ice-flooded fields – stomping across brittle ice.
Ice flowers left out overnight in glasses, chrysanthemums suspended in frozen water – pink with cold.
I walk in this garden
Holding the hands of dead friends
Old age came quickly for my frosted generation
Cold, cold, cold they died so silently
Did the forgotten generations scream?
Or go full of resignation
Quietly protesting innocence
Cold, cold, cold they died so silently
Linked hands at four AM
Deep under the city you slept on
Never heard the sweet flesh song
Cold, cold, cold they died so silently
I have no words
My shaking hand
Cannot express my fury
Sadness is all I have,
Cold, cold, cold they died so silently
Matthew fucked Mark fucked Luke fucked John
Who lay in the bed that I lie on
Touch fingers again as you sing this song
Cold, cold, cold they died so silently
My gilly flowers, roses, violets blue
Sweet garden of vanished pleasures
Please come back next year
Cold, cold, cold I die so silently
Goodnight boys,
Goodnight Johnny,
Goodnight,
Goodnight.
A thin winter sun. My head aches at the frontier of my vision, my stomach churns, turns, a dull thud in the eye, my neck irritated by a rash I have had since I first fell ill.
Am I happy? Yes. Continuously entertained by HB and his sad long face as the washing machine dies in the darkened kitchen.
Derek Ball cooked one of his piping hot Dungeness fish stews. His friends Tim and Tod lit the guy they had built: a Minoan snake goddess in the image of Imelda Marcos carrying a pair of golden shoes – with a conical dress of driftwood and floral crimplene wired together with fireworks, high-waisted with a belt of gold streamers and breasts of hangers. A small face painted on a paper plate – delicate as the moon, with an enigmatic smile. Arms outstretched, she stood ten feet tall and burnt like a torch.
Derek’s cat Spyder chased sparks in the dark. The lighthouse flashed over the Channel and the twinkling lights of fishing boats. Sheet lightning illuminated distant thunder clouds. The stars shone bright and Maria Callas blasted out Puccini arias in the dark. Tod and Tim stoked the flames in long black highwaymen’s coats.
Will my voice echo till time ends? Will it journey forever into the void?
Is black hopeless? Doesn’t every dark thundercloud have a silver lining? In black lies the possibility of hope.
The universal sleep is hugged by black. A comfortable, warm black. This is no cold black, it is against this black that the rainbow shines like the stars.
Black is boundless, the imagination races in the dark. Vivid dreams careering through the night. Goya’s bats with goblin faces chuckle in the dark.
In the black coal fire lives the spirit of storytelling. Flickering blue and scarlet flames. It was around the fire at night that men and women told their stories in the pitchy black.
Prospect Cottage has four rooms. I call this room the Spring room; it is my writing room and bedroom, 12ft by 10 of polished tongue and groove with a single window facing the sea. In front of the window is my desk: a simple 18th century elm table. On it is a reading lamp of tarnished copper, two pewter mugs full of stamps, loose change, paperclips, several bottles of ink, and pens, envelopes, scraps of paper on which to make notes for this diary, an iron spittoon used as an ashtray; in the centre a lead tobacco box in the shape of a little Victorian cottage, in which I keep my chequebook and money.
To the left and right against the wall are two Red Cross medicine chests from an army surplus store; here I keep my clothes. A large oak chest dominates the room: it has 15th century panels carved with decorative ogee arches, perhaps once part of a rood screen. I keep my bedding in it. Next to it is a teak and khaki canvas campaign chair. By the desk is a small chair with a rush seat carved with two Maltese crosses.
On three walls are three paintings:
Night Life
The scarlet and black painting of fire, done in 1980.
Sleep has the House
A driftwood and glass construction with a carved figure, 21 December 1987.
Glittering Astronaut
By John Maybury.
In the four corners of the room are driftwood staffs crowned with garlands of stone and polished bone; on one of these sits my pixie Twinkle-in the-eye. Purple velvet curtains shut out the winter stars.
A still, frosty morning – sun bright on the glittering shingle, not a cloud in the sky and very cold. Well wrapped I walked to the beach.
I love the mornings here – up with the sunshine, cups of coffee, steaming porridge and toast. The quiet is overwhelming after the snarling traffic of the Charing Cross Road.
Now the flowers are dead; the multicoloured flints, and the bright red bricks ground by the waves give it a friendly appearance.
It isn’t a gloomy garden, its circles and squares have humour – a fairy ring for troglodytic pixies – the stones a notation for long-forgotten music, an ancestral round to which I add a few more notes each morning.
By sundown yesterday a new window was opened up in the kitchen wall. I ate my supper facing the nuclear power station – ablaze with light under a star-filled sky and mandarin moon. A twentieth century Babylon, great glittering liner beached in the wilderness.
A new ladder to the fishing loft is also in place, which has made the house asymmetrical. It has made the climb a leisurely affair: no more balancing on wobbly ladders. I painted it with sticky black tar varnish – tar itself is impossible to find since the coke fired gas plants closed down.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry for the unseasonable warmth and sunshine of the last four days. The thrift outside the front door is at sixes and sevens and has put out bright pink flowers. In spite of a weather forecast that foretold rain it is warm and sunny again. I walked along the beach gathering stones with holes and returned to thread them into a necklace.
As the sun went down the rain set in. I am surprised how happy I have been with my own company these last few weeks – by now I should be itching to get back to London. But I’m happy here, brewing a scatterbrained mix of soups and porridge.
I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale –
Another year is passing
In the roaring waters
I hear the voices of dead friends
Love is life that lasts forever.
My heart’s memory turns to you
David. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul …
But what if this present
Were the world’s last night?
In the setting sun your love fades
Dies in the moonlight
Fails to rise
Thrice denied by cock crow
In the dawn’s first light.
I find it mysterious that all the years that have passed should lead to Prospect Cottage – perhaps it is the tin roof which reminds me of the Nissen huts of an RAF childhood in its forties, so thrifty and far distant; maybe it is the flower bed which runs in front of the house – it has the same lumps of concrete from some long-demolished fortification as those in Abingdon and Kidlington; or the stoves which roar in the wind; or maybe the name Prospect.
Today there is solitude, a half-hour has elapsed without a car passing and the phone is silent, and though it’s cold I’m well wrapped up in my grey sweater and an old cordurory jacket – as worn as a moss-grown wall. I feel higgledy-piggledy. No appetite today.
A view of boats fuzzed by the dismal rain that patters on the metal roof. The smallest money spider is building a web on the desk light, so fine that my breath swings it back and forth. It’s possible to be alone here.
My garden is a memorial, each circular bed and dial a true lover’s knot – planted with lavender, helichrysum and santolina.
Santolina, under the dominion of Mercury resisteth poison, putrefaction, and heals the bites of venomous beasts. Whilst a sprig of lavender held in the hand or placed under the pillow enables you to see ghosts, travel to the land of the dead.
While Peter digs holes for the hellebores we find the first snowdrops peeping through the pinks, which have covered large areas of the front beds, more bright marigolds and few purple crocus in bloom. In spite of the wind and cold there are a few buds breaking on the elder, and the poppies and cornflowers have doubled in size since Christmas.
The first splatter of rain sparkles the windows, I was going to clean them but a wave of lethargy kept me from wandering around the garden. There is a gale blowing, though it is not cold – gales disturb my equilibrium.
I’ve put some plants out and placed the Appledore crucifix under the Florentine trumpet. The garden looks a January delight; in spite of the gales everything is ready to contend with the summer, which besets the flowers more than the cold and dark.
All day long the sun tried to break through the clouds, twice it started to rain and then thought better of it. I could feel the cold on my back as I worked in the garden planting cistus, teucrium and two new iris. Busy as a lark, industrious as a bumble bee – I saw a large one in my daffodils. HB hates daffs, says they look vulgar. Here they stand surreal in the shingle, quite out of place.
The grape hyacinth loves the shingle and each year increases itself by bounds. They are sturdy, defy the salt winds and last for months, some have been out for weeks, others are bursting into bloom.
The sea kale have grown inches in the last week, the deep inky purple has a touch of green in it, the same colour as the wallflower buds. The sea, which was roaring rough yesterday, is a calm, milky turquoise. The seagulls are squabbling with the crows, fishermen are repairing the boat that was stove in in the storm. The bees, bright-yellow with gorse-pollen, are blown off course and crawl around the hive waiting for a lull in the gusts.
Brian had painted the house a shiny black with tar varnish, he is to restore Prospect Cottage – I’m having new windows and a diamond door, with leaded ‘Love is life that lasts for ever’.
Prospect ablaze with wallflowers, although it was raining and my nose was running with cold I could just smell them. The garden has leapt away, there are tulips, the first cornflower, enormous flower heads on the artichokes, scarlet anemones and the last grape hyacinths. There are buds on the valerian and the borage is out.
It was a day of moving and pottering.