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The Crab Walks

“Clouted Cream of Devon. The thickened, conspissated, or

curdled cream, common in all our Farm-houses, is of

Egyptian origin…” p.108, Sylva Antiqua Iscana,

Numismatica, Quintiam Furgina by W. T. P. Shortt,

Exeter: 1837.

“The trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss

history happened overseas…” The Satanic Verses, Salman

Rushdie, London & New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.

We’re walking down the edge of the Teign... the signs say

this is the Templer Walk, but I'm not convinced this is

anything... have we lost the track? We're just on the river

bed and we’re lucky it’s low tide. Anjali's with me - she's

an Indian-born actress - she's just come from touring New

York with the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of

Midnight's Children and I’m dragging her along this

damp, slippery river bed, pointing out where I think the

Bishop's Palace is on the other side. Underfoot its very

slippery and a bit soft... and the rocks are covered in dark

green seaweed... there's a dead crab here and there... and

another... and another.... there's lots of them. I hadn't

noticed them at first, they're green shore crabs... good

disguise in the weed, but once we see one we can’t help

seeing them, shell after shell – like when you learn a new

word and then you see it everywhere - and the crabs all

seem to have been eaten very efficiently by something,

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hollowed out from the back so the shells are

left…perfect… untouched except for a little hole behind the

legs. I say to Anjali that it must have been the herring

gulls...

I thought those herring gulls were going to hollow me out.

In Hitchcock’s The Birds there's a shot from right up with

the gulls and they're looking down on the burning gas

station. It’s an image I’ve had for my own displaced

viewpoint on these explorings, but this time I felt the gulls

were looking down on me like they looked down on that

gas station... the land stretched like a screen and them up

there in that layer, kind of skin, kind of shell… the

archaeologicalisation of site-specificity and dérive turned

on its head (put on its feet), the layers now in the sky.

Notebook: “It is not that the ‘content’ of the Koran is

directly disputed; rather by revealing other enunciatory

positions and possibilities within the framework of Koranic

reading, Rushdie performs the subversion of its authenticity

through the act of cultural translation – he relocates the

Koran’s intentionality by repeating and reinscribing it in

the locale of the novel of postwar cultural migrations and

diasporas.” (p226, Homi Bhabha, The Location Of Culture,

London: Routledge, 1994) Can this be applied to my South

Devon perform/walk work? By relocating the ‘English

seaside’ into Hindu/Indian storytelling? (not to challenge

its ‘content’ but to relocate it.. & thus relativise it.)”

It all started when I disturbed some nesting gulls at the top

of the old steps, just by the Old Quay docks in Teignmouth,

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next to Number 1 Warehouse. I had to shelter in doorways

and against walls and gravestones as my paranoia circled

overhead, or perched itself on gutters and gargoyles. I made

for the unusual shape of St James the Less, hugging the

walls of the houses.

“1268 – 1968 Pride In the Past, Praise For the Present,

Faith in The Future.” 1968 was the year that the

Teignmouth Electron sailed out past the Ness. This

octagonal shaped church is one of only two in England –

why would they change it from the shape of the cross?

Peter nearly locked me in. Peter is a kindly man, a member

of the congregation who lives in a pink cottage next to the

eight-sided church. He shows me the rose tree he has

planted where his wife’s ashes are scattered. In the central

aisle he pulls back the carpet to expose the shape left where

a single tree trunk once stood supporting the roof. He once

tried to turn off a glowing Moses. Above the ghostshape of

the tree stump is the great rising lantern over the nave, 16

windows, through which George Lake of Bitton Street

believed his soul would escape to heaven; which worried

him – what if he went out the wrong window? Where

would you go?

I was walking from Dawlish Warren to Paignton. I was

looking for something; connections back through time and

across space, because this coast is where I would once

come for holidays. I set out to walk back to find those

experiences, when my Nan and Pop would take me out of

school for a couple of days and bring me down here to stay

off-season in a Guest House on the front at Paignton - I

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was about ten. And for a couple of days I’d live in off-

season limbo, the bits of town not shut would be eerily

quiet – I think that’s why I loved those old TV programmes

like The Avengers when everyone in the world but the

heroes fall asleep and there’s free shopping everywhere…

and those George Romero zombies take over the world

movies – Dawn of The Dead - because they make the

world a playground again, they make shopping centres into

landscapes, they make it my off season in Paignton in 1965

again. In the film of Dean Koontz’s Phantoms there even a

line about being “out of season”. Tarkovsky’s Stalker that

I saw re-enacted in a Budapest studio theatre, inside a

wooden box, us, the audience, peering through large slats

into a shifting dune of sand. And last year the herring gulls

– I thought were trying to eat my brains. And, though I

didn’t feel like enjoying it at the time – I was doing that

world as playground exploration thing, but with the fear, as

if the zombies were there too, this time. Anyway, the walk

was about finding those precious feelings again, and the

place where I felt them.

It’s only as I write this

that I notice that I chose

to walk in the summer.

We’d always stay in the

same guesthouse – run

by Jeff and Joy who

were friends of my

grandparents – and the

next door guesthouse was run by the mother of either Jeff

or Joy. The guesthouses stood, and still stand, opposite a

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large hotel that I remember as sandy red and magical, like a

fairy castle… in fact, it’s not red, but it’s called red… it’s

the Redcliffe Hotel, though I think – from a painting that’s

in there – that it was once and briefly red… and the reason

it’s magical is that it’s a wormhole to India, the design of it

is all based on Indian buildings from Delhi – the Red Fort,

the Qutb Minar, the Jami Musjid - and that’s why Anjali

was with me, because I wanted to travel not just across

time, but also across sensibility.

So I’m walking now, on those

slippery rocks, worrying a bit

for Anjali – she was a dancer

until she injured her back and I

don’t want her doing any more

damage. It’s hard work, not

much cooler than the very hot

day I was struggling up Upper

Woodbury Road on the other

side of the river on my way up

to that strange area on the top

of Little Haldon, passing the

Psycho/Amityville Horror

burned-out shell of an old

people’s home house on my left – like a huge version of

those empty crab shells - I climbed over the wall and

sneaked into the overgrown gardens and a voice shouted

“Phil!” No one came.

Past the barely humming substation. One of the greatest

scientists of electricity lived in Paignton. I walked past his

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house - he was as paranoid about everything as I was of

herring gulls. A quiet man, a deaf man. At the end, his best

friend was the local policeman who’d blow his whistle

through the letter box to get him to answer the door. Oliver

Heaviside guessed that all round the planet we live on there

must be some kind of ionised layer that radio waves would

bounce off when we broadcasted them rather than just drift

off into space. It’s now called the Kennely/Heaviside

Layer. It’s up there, all the time we’re walking, exploring,

above the layer of herring gulls, our thoughts and messages

bouncing off it and back

down to us again.

I say to Anjali that she’s

got to get us to somewhere

towards the Ness, even

though she doesn’t have a

map and she doesn’t know

the area at all. She cuts inland through deserted lanes, past

a cricket pitch that seems to be in the middle of nowhere,

no one there, and then through a hamlet of medieval

buildings where people are mending an old barn. It’s hot

and everything seems magical. Along one of the lanes the

shaping of trees and ahead the bending of the road combine

to make a little theatre of dread… a hint of something very

old in the shadows, something still alive long after it should

have been dead, but not just scary… it’s a kind of

philosophical feeling… Kierkegaard calls this the feeling of

possibility’s possibility, the freedom anterior to freedom, a

place where you get the sense of just how big possible can

be. Anjali recognises this feeling and we agree how when

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you see this shape and get this feeling there’s always

something extraordinary just beyond. When we get there

it’s like a magical grove, you’d miss it in a car – like you’d

miss that silvery place in the rain along the New North

Road just before Taddyforde Gate, it’s almost too scary to

stay in, like they built a motorway through Stonehenge and

you broke down in the middle of it. We find a pub in the

next village – Stokeinteignhead - appropriately the Wild

Goose – because we’ve been chasing it without knowing

what it is! It does wonderful food - and we sit out in its

back garden, with the church, and there’s sheep in the field,

and these shed-like cranky lean-to’s, and Anjali tells me

that the day has taken her back to childhood in Bangalore,

reading Enid Blyton adventures.

I eat the faggots – they are so rich and fatty, they are

overwhelming. When I was a kid faggots to me meant tins

of Brains Faggots and I wouldn’t eat them - I thought they

were made of brains. We had an image of Ganesh on our

wall at home. My dad brought it back from a business trip

to Calcutta in the late 1970s, but I remember it all the way

back to much younger days. I’ve projected the memory

backwards. Ganesh gets his head cut off, but rather than

have to carry it to a shed, he gets a new – elephantine –

prodigious appetite for memory.

Was that what I was doing? Because the more I walked the

less I could remember anything about these places I’d been

to as a child. And yet I really wanted to get back to those

feelings I’d had.

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When my Pop died my Nan said: “he loved you, you

know” – and that wasn’t a word generally overused in our

family. I missed that feeling of returning through the mist

to Paignton Harbour – just me and Pop and the fisherman –

feeling safe in the mist, wrapped up as warm in that as in

my old rust jumper. I suppose I still miss my Nan’s

pancakes in the shapes of any animals I wanted…

elephants, mainly, and strange mutant shapes, patterns,

would appear in batter,

spreading out across the

pan… and then the sugar

and lemon… those were

the feelings I wanted to get

back… the sugar and

lemon of being a kid, the

stick of rock and the sea-

smelling crabs in a bucket.

My Nan was a glass blower, my Pop was a pattern-maker.

I started my search at Dawlish Warren station. On the train

down from Exeter I’d kept my eyes peeled. Haldon

Belvedere, up on the hill top is a sort of triangular rocket to

India – built by Robert Palk, the Governor of Madras, to

celebrate his love for Stringer Lawrence, a friendship

almost entirely lived out in India, built on the hill from

where Marconi bounced radio waves off the sky. Go and

visit it when it’s open – Rachel and Daniel, and we take

Rachel’s friend Aurelia, they explore the remnants of

garden, you walk up the drive there and the belvedere

slowly grows out from behind the trees up into the blue and

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inside you curl round the stairs into an inlayed wooden

floored music room, the shape of a Hindu swastika in the

centre. When I got out at Dawlish Warren, the first place

I’d intended to go and visit, maybe knock on the door – the

old wooden station house – was a pile of charred beams

and ashes. There was a sign: “Arson. 5 am at the “Old

Station”.

I thought “bloody kids, this

wouldn’t have happened

before…” and then in a

book about Cock’ood and

Dawlish Warren I found a

picture of the Dawlish

Warren station house in

flames in the 1930s and the writer, just the same as me,

suspecting the young lads in the foreground. In one of the

shelters on the platform, someone has used a cigarette

lighter to burn a swastika into the roof.

Later when I go to show Anjali it has

been painted over in white. I went over

to where there were some officials

investigating the burned wreckage and I

pointed this out. And the moment I

started I knew I shouldn’t have. I knew

that sort of connection – the crime

solved by a brilliant deduction made

from an esoteric symbol, etc. – that

only ever happens in movies, so I said

that too… and I knew that I shouldn’t

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have said that either. I was quickly on the way to becoming

a suspect… which also only happens in the movies… so I

made my excuses and left.

Fire is a dangerous way of travelling. It’s a transition

between yourself and something much bigger – a transition

between a worshipper and a god – because a human cannot

live through it.

I didn’t go straight to the beach or to the Warren, I went the

land side of The Creep, where everyone thinks there’s

nothing to see. There are the Warren Holiday Bungalows

with great eagles on the gates. The angry signs at Gerald’s.

On a chair: FOR TRYING SHOES NOT FOR RESTING!!

On a table: SORRY THIS IS NOT A PICNIC OR REST

AREA!! Pity – shops should be like little leisure centres –

go and have your tea at the Furniture Warehouse, put your

feet up… eat your breakfast in the Kitchen Warehouse…

the world’s a kind of playground. Be a brain eating zombie.

There are “curries” at Bowes Take Away: Chicken, Beef or

Prawn - £2.80. I walk past the mis-engraved bench for

Walter Erich Witt “with treasured mememories” - it says

“here he found peace and tranquillity” but when I walk by

the cars are changing gear going up Mount Pleasant Hill, a

pneumatic drill is working, and a car passes with the

tambourine hiss and bass beat of hip hop - my bones shake

as if I was wearing them on the outside. At the top there’s

this dread place, next to the Holiday Park: an unused gate

with a pathway, like an entrance to somewhere magical,

you wouldn’t give it a second look if you didn’t know what

to look for. There’s the imbalance of stone on one side and

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brieze-block on the other, the trees make a portal and the

gate hasn’t been opened in years, it’s a place for useless

ritual waiting, like the gate in Kafka’s The Trial. A place

for darshan. Up the hill, turn right down the lane past

Golden Sands holiday park and there’s a strange doorway

four feet up the bank, hovering. An hour later after finding

my way past the shells of boarded up properties, the ruins

of monumental stones and mini-gardens in metal bowls on

the industrial estate, vacant units like missing teeth, over

the way from the end of Shutterton Lane houses with

names like Deodar and Keranda, every garden a Z World, I

find I’m on the other side of that hovering gateway, inside

the Lady’s Mile Holiday Park – there’s an accidentally

significant pattern in its concrete step, but I can’t remember

what it was significant of and up at the top of the holiday

park, I sit down among the fairy rings - there’s this great

bowling view to these white buildings, it says hospital on

the map, but I still don’t really know what they are, the

kind of buildings you got in Quatermass movies used for

sinister operations, and there’s a big house up there too, but

I’ve never been there… perhaps its connected to the

weirdness up on the top of Little Haldon… all I know is

that it’s called Mamhead House – because it’s built on a

hill shaped like a breast - getting back towards the sea - me

and Tom, the sound designer, walk up to this strange place,

there’s no name, but an odd acronym and a sign that says:

“No unauthorized chemicals permitted on this site” – it’s a

big place and part of it is like a windowless barn out of the

mid-west nowhere bad movie USA, the kind of place where

something grim, but gothic in a scene from Jeepers

Creepers might take place, but it’s new it’s not old, and yet

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it feels haunted already - it seems to be completely

unmanned, automatic… but there’s a driver delivering

something and he sees us and comes over… sees us

looking… he walks over, a long way: “What’s happening?

What’s the crack?” he says, pretending to be friendly, but

he’s aggressive, interrogating. Just in case we’re terrorists,

set on poisoning the water supply. We’re acting out a little

microcosmic agit-prop of world tension next to a sewage

farm. His last question is “Which way are you walking

next?” But that’s the thing with ‘drifting’, isn’t it? As if he

were going to have us followed.

In the Verandah Room of the Langstone Cliff Hotel the

books on the shelves include Pilgrim’s Progress,

Gulliver’s Travels, Come To Denmark and Arthur Mee’s

The King’s England, Devon volume – including this

epitaph by Hannah More for General Stringer Lawrence:

“As mercy mild, yet terrible as war,

Here Lawrence rests: the trump of honest fame

From Thames to Ganges has proclaimed his name.

In vain this frail memorial friendship rears;

His dearest monuments an army’s tears.”

On the posters it says: “medieval jousting – as seen on TV”

– I didn’t know TV was so old. I go to Giggles Fun Shop,

it’s like an erotic temple… with walking pussies, (not

Maria Edgeworth’s pet, I’m afraid) and phallic ice cube

makers … the male and female… the lingum and the yoni

– the Cow’s Hole at Coryton Cove, a very impressive

phallic gatepost on the road into Paignton.

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Under the Creep I take a left across the dunes towards the

Warren itself. My red and white walking wand attracts

attention. The Warren is a spit of sand, always changing

shape. The far end of the Warren is a Third Space, the

dialectical synthesis of human effort and nature: and both

of them are missing. So, no binary banality. Almost every

trace of the houses that stood on the sand seventy years ago

has gone. It seems natural on the sand and yet there are

gabions buried not far down, among the bones of sailors

that cry out in the pages of local ‘history’ pamphlets.

History is a ghost here, the sea is a fugitive from justice.

Dogfish turn into the soles of shoes. Some miniaturist

regularly updates a sculpture of driftwood and stones.

Large flocks of birds march and flutter like the letters of a

language not settled upon yet.

Time to think. Of how to express Homi Bhabha’s “cultural

difference as opposed to cultural

diversity… (with its) corresponding

containment of it… a norm given by

the host society or dominant culture

which says that ‘these other cultures

are fine, but we must be able to locate

them within our own grid’. That is

what I mean by a creation of cultural

diversity and a containment of

cultural difference.” (p.208, Homi

Bhabha, The Third Space, interview

in Identity; Community, Culture,

Difference ed. Rutherford, J.,

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London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990) Bahbha describes the

mechanism for this so: “the sign of the ‘cultured’ is the

ability to appreciate cultures in a kind of musée imaginaire;

as though one should be able to collect and appreciate

them… to understand and locate cultures … only

eventually to transcend them…” (p.208, The Third

Space.) Bhabha’s antidote to this is “the notion of a politics

which is based on unequal, uneven, multiple and potentially

antagonistic, political identities. This must not be confused

with some form of autonomous, individualist pluralism

(and the corresponding notion of cultural diversity)… (but

made) in that productive space of the construction of

culture as difference…” (p.208-9, The Third Space.)

I have to call Symbolism to my aid – the setting in

astronomical motion of ideas and images, myself within

that motion; neither appropriating the motion, nor

dissolving the uncomfortably granular surfaces of

‘identity’. In their orbits about each other the ideas and

images describe the grids and graphs, the curves of big

space and cosily domestic-sounding ‘basins’ of attraction,

just as politically inscribed and neo-Platonically out there

as the probabilistic “difference” that borrows energy to

burst into momentary existence before paying it back and

disappearing into potentiality again. Through this ludic

geometry ‘I’ make a pedestrian ‘progress’, shaped and

disrupting; identity historicized.

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The intention of this particular

fragmenting of the self is not a

“kind of pure anarchic liberalism”,

but rather the “recognition of the

importance of the alienation of the

self in the construction of forms of

solidarity.” (p.213, The Third

Space.)

The challenge is to resist a culture

of ‘tolerance’ and its appropriation

of the ‘other’ to the dominant

under the guise of diversity, while

resisting, without destroying, the potential for antagonistic

identity becoming actual antagonism. What Bhabha calls

“negotiation”. To neither deny the grit and granular texture

of one’s own accumulated ‘identity’ nor the resistant

friction of any other, while refusing to resist that resistant,

refusing to lock with that friction (into an empiricism, a

division of ideological labour) – not to grin and bear it, but

to continuously lock in and out of it – a kind of Beluosov-

Zhabotinskii reaction – refusing to “snap off a chunk of

visual experience, disconnect it from the continuum”– but

rather than ‘resisting’ entropy, to resist the loss of free

energy bleeding into violence or co-option.

“8/ a/ All create a slow motion action… start off doing

your own movement and then see if you can all end up

doing the same movement… then keep doing that one

movement (in slow motion) …

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b/ Now one of you becomes a catalyst and moves around

the group changing everyone’s action in the same way -

…till everyone is doing the same new action…

c/ now (once everyone is doing the changed motion) the

first person to have their movement changed becomes a

counter catalyst and they change everyone back to the

original motion

d/ when everyone is back doing the original the first

person to be changed back now becomes the catalyst and

changes everyone’s action to a new one – and so on… get

this going and see what patterns emerge.”

(Exercises at Priory High School, Exeter, with year 8 and

10 pupils – Patterns In The Mind, Patterns In The

World workshops for DAISI, winter 2003.)

This is a crude visualisation of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii

(BZ) reaction; that appears to defy the second law of

thermodynamics because those things it works through

seem to be able to become complex – like milk in coffee -

and then go back to being simple – like milk and coffee…

by the equivalent of reversing the motion of the spoon.

Actually, it only puts things off for a time; eventually the

second law of thermodynamics must have its way and the

process breaks down into irrecoverable complexity – but in

the interim the catalyst and counter-catalyst reaction

produces patterns, some like spirals, others like the

branches of a tree. This is thought to be how the

camouflage patterns on zebras are formed. And how slime

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mold comes to move, in its collective patterns – without a

pacemaker cell – as its catalysts/counter-catalysts turn it on

and off. (This is what I am trying to do – to create the

equivalent of a BZ reaction that maintains the availability

of ‘free energy’ and resists the collapse into the easy

hybridity that Bhabha ciriticises, the meme-complexity that

is so hard to resist. For a limited, agitated ‘journey’ of

catalyst and counter-catalyst, to hold ‘out of time’ the free-

floated ‘simpler’ memes (a process that in Bunyan’s

writing Robert Blatchford calls “selection”), not real but

ideological origins in a curved field that resists snapping or

disconnection.

“9/ act out in slow motion:

individual spores (almost like eggs hatching) – becoming

amoeba and eating

running out of food – searching around for more…

this means they come closer together, but in a BZ reaction

– so coming closer, while changing back and forward

from one state of movement to another – what pattern

does this create?

In slime mold these patterns are

spirals…

Now do that again, but this time as you get closer, become

like one organism…

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What sort of pattern did that

create? And how did you find that

you were moving?”

(Exercises for Patterns In The Mind, Patterns In The

World workshops at Priory High School, Exeter.)

In slime mold a whole crowd of these organisms move like

a single slug, but with a circular movement at its centre,

(like the inside of a wave) while the individual amoeba

have a kind of streaming or tree-like shape, reaching out,

branch-like. These movements in slime mold organisms

can be modelled mathematically. By taking the density of

the amoebas, the concentration of cyclic/AMP (which is the

chemical that triggers the amoebas’ movement) in the

amoebas’ vicinity and the fraction of active cyclic/AMP

receptors per amoeba cell, the equations produce the maths

for both spirals and branch like patterns – both the organic

chemistry of the animals, but also

the physics of universal forces

expressed in the maths are in

operation, crossing boundaries

between living and non-living

forces.

“We do not know where life

begins, if it has a beginning.

There may be and probably is no

ultimate distinction between the

living and the dead.” (p386,

Electromagnetic Theory, Oliver

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Heaviside, London: E. & F.N. Spon 1951, first published

1912.)

“9/ now using the forms and patterns you’ve used today,

without any discussion…

a/ make a city…”

(Exercises at Priory High School, Exeter.)

Grit in the eye. Sleepy dust in roofless ‘hell’.

“…Western culture, its liberalism and relativism – these

very potent mythologies of ‘progress’ – also contain a

cutting edge, a limit…. I try to place myself in that position

of liminality, in that productive space… symbol-forming

and subject-constituting… (this) act of producing the icons

and symbols, the

myths and

metaphors through

which we live

culture, must always

– by virtue of the

fact that they are

forms of

representation –

have within them a

self-alienating limit. Meaning is constructed across the bar

of the difference and separation between the signifier and

the signified… its own symbol forming activity…always

underscores the claim to an originary, holistic, organic

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identity… they are always subject to intrinsic forms of

translation… only constituted in relation to that otherness

internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes

them decentred structures - … then we see that all forms of

culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me

the importance is not to be able to trace two original

moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to

me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to

emerge. This third space displaces the histories that

constitute it…” (p.209 – 211, The Third Space)

The history is almost entirely forgotten and is so recent.

The nature is so false and constructed. There’s this snake-

like line of wood posts bending into the sea. I think it must

be some land artist who’s put it there and is enjoying the

way the posts are decaying. But it’s a different kind of

wave breaker – an old experimental groyne - a difference,

rotting.

A washed up dogfish is as hard as plastic. It looks like an

old sandal. It could once sense faint electrical fields around

its victims. A bleak place where ghosts were once

condemned to plait ropes from sand, till the swans turn

black. Out here, in a bleakness that isn’t just about

wilderness; in London I drifted for two hours from the

Aldwych to Monument and I did not see a single child,

with Exmouth so strangely close and yet the waters so

dangerous, just 70 years ago this was the site of a thriving

weekend community (and some all year rounders) living in

foundationless, wooden houses and before that there was a

cliff of sand, when a woman would bring her cattle across

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the river to graze on the Warren and before that there was a

Royalist fort on the tip defeated and destroyed, but once

you know – then the place is haunted with them; figures as

translucent as the dogfish skin, the last cannibalised houses

rising up around me on the waves, people running up flags

and playing tennis and fleeing from the raging tide. There

are Christmas trees buried under the dunes. The Greenland

Lake, once muddy inlet and then open saltmarsh is now

grassland and scrub, the ghosts of these different ways of

being a place blossom and compete: Californian Tree Lupin

(a garden escapee), Autumn Ladies Tresses and Southern

Marsh Orchids.

Things change. The warren has only been here 7,000 years,

the remains of a 500,000 year old desert. Like fire things

change.

“For when the tide rises it oft seems to say,

“Friend Warren, you’d better get out of my way.”

And, t’is said, the Town Council, whose wisdom’s

profound,

Intend with a chain to encircle it round,

Then fasten it up to Mount Pleasant, behind it

So that, should the sea drown, they’ll be able to find it.

One member proposes – of whom it is said

There’s more to admire in his heart than his head –

That the use of the new city roller should be

To flatten the Warren and roll back the sea…”

I set off to walk to Dawlish, along the front. I climbed up

on the sea wall, but when I turned round to take a

22

photograph there’s a policeman striding up the wall after

me. Below me to seaward three Christmas trees lodge in

the rocks. On the landward side the spectral outlines of a

chalking competition. It’s not yet 9am. “We’re looking for

a man – 47…” I was 47. “…grey hair…” It’s me! What’s

happened? “Slim build.” I said to the officer: “Well, I’m

47, but even my best friends …” They’re looking for a man

with depression. I look out for, but don’t see this man. Only

more policemen. There’s a bunch of flowers tied to a new

green metal bench. “Donated for the future with loving

memories of the past.” Looking two ways at once. I met the

policeman again: “What a lovely day,” he said, “I can

almost see my house…” and he pointed over to Exmouth.

“Can you see the church, it’s just behind that, in the

haze…” and he waved to it, as if his wife might have been

looking out for him. The Langstone Cliff Hotel appeared up

on my left, nestled in a dip, snug in its modern

endoskeleton, like a hermit crab or a ‘lazy’ lobster. A

misanthropic old railwayman tells me the police have

arrested four lads for the fire at the Old Station House…

maybe they’re the four lads in the 1930s photo. I ask at the

Red Rock Snack bar what the round shape under the water

is? “Dinosaur’s nest…” she says. Time gets mixed up on

this part of the coast. “No, it’s a tower they built to stop the

water washing away the rock… didn’t work… it all fell

down…”

There’s the sign of a leaf beside the railway line.

I do get a strange feeling along this part of the sea wall. On

one side the sea pulls you towards it – on the other the

23

railway tracks whirr just before the express explodes. Like

the channa puri Anjali told me about being on sale on

Indian beaches – put into the mouth whole and bite into the

puri bread and the sweet and sour sauce bursts onto your

tongue. The train passes so close it seems to burst from puri

bread through my head. This is where they filmed The

Ghost Train – Arthur Askey running up the track… “I

thang yoooo! I thang yoooo! You’ve been wonderful to

me!” - the ghostliest thing about that film is the plot –

Arnold Ridley wrote it – the old man in Dad’s Army –

“Can I be excused, Mister Mainwaring?” - his ‘ghosts’ turn

out to be gun-smuggling West Country Bolsheviks… is

there something we ought to be told? Did they have a

revolution in the West Country and no one noticed? History

is an odd thing. It keeps changing.

The surface – every now and again - boils and through it

there’s a racing flash of silver. I climb down a stone

causeway to get a closer look and I see thousands of sand

eels chased by a single mackerel that strikes in a sweeping

curve of quicksilver, the fleeing eels shaking the surface

again, the ripples spreading and intersecting and becoming

new shapes … like a geometry lesson spread out on the sea,

like memes forming complexes chased by one great racing

simple silver fish.

As I come into Dawlish, up above and set back from the

track is a dark, grimy house with eyeless windows. Sinister,

ancient and nameless. It’s straight out of a horror film. The

sort of 1920s seaside continental look, but haunted by

something very, very old.

24

In the concrete, someone has written “JUST WATCH OUT

MUSIC LAND”.

Suddenly I don’t want to walk into Dawlish along the front.

I’ve been there before. I like the beaches, but there’s

something gone wrong about the front. In 1907 Henry

Harris wrote: “This charming little South Devon watering

hole is happy in having no history.” Like it gave it away in

some pact. So I cut inland, up steps, and a winding road

and I reach the top of Strand Hill roofed in trees and cutting

down through walls of sandstone, I descended a little way –

there’s no pavement - and then cut up a path on the right, a

tall stern wall on my right, a wild untended garden on my

left followed by a wrought iron gate through which is an

over-wrought garden, into a little Z World of gardens and

gates – there’s a car with a large handwritten sign in the

windscreen: “You enter this car at your own risk.” I wind

through and find a footpath at the top of Commons Lane,

twice I see there are metal buckets buried in the earth wall

that runs down one side. I follow the footpath’s windings to

a gate – with views inland and back to the Exe estuary – I

can see where I’ve been. I carry on another 20 yards and

climb a stile into a field. Now the inland is laying itself out

for me, but what catches my eye is the hedge by my side, a

thorn tree blown into a bouquet of serpents, writhing in the

hedgerow…

…you get a sort of feeling when things are coming up,

when you are about to find somewhere special. It’s to do

with the shapes of the place. It’s like one is sliding down

25

curved space into attractiveness. Even if you’re walking

uphill there’s no effort in the walking. Because you’re

walking another kind of geography. It’s a kind of physics

of walking… Albert Einstein discovered that gravity, the

thing holding us onto the Earth also pulls everything else,

just enough so that space is bent, curvy. And there’s a kind

of gravity at work here, pulling you towards the good

places… if you know how to feel it… and once you do you

can skateboard down the side of those basins of

attraction…

I climb another stile and I’m in it. Beneath me is the inland

part of Dawlish with a church mysteriously stuck on its

edge, holding back the town from rolling grounds with

lollipop trees – a selfish giant’s garden. And all around me,

hidden in the edge of grass in the field are old tree

stumps… they seem very old… as if this were some kind of

a meeting place, a place of the Old Ones, - one of the

stumps looks like that mountain Richard Dreyfuss and all

the other contactees are irrationally drawn to, seeing its

shape everywhere, in pillows, in piles of mash potato,

travelling to it (drawn by this curvature of shape) for the

alien landing in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. I

wonder if that church is a St Michael’s? It feels like it

should be. Like there is something of angels and aliens

about this place. The great body of air that hangs above the

town should be traversed by a silver craft, curving like a

hunting mackerel across the purple clouds, against the

green hills, over the cream town. Under circling birds of

prey, huge ones, buzzards I assume – and a small reddish-

orange one. There are Christmas trees being grown just

26

behind me. I imagine them next to the telly in a living

room, I imagine them being buried under sand. The homes

opposite are thousands of eyes. Argus the giant lounging on

the hill. This is a magical spot to see everything – “RUN,

you tart!!” (student performance, Site, Landscape and

Performance module, Dartington College of Arts, 2002) -

the carving up of land, the shape of a town, the

suggestiveness of the hills… to sit and see those shapes

forming inside you.

Eventually I’m too excited to sit still and look anymore and

I set off back towards the centre of town, slipping down the

side of that valley of attraction – the hum of people – there

are foxgloves everywhere – like there was a massacre of

saints – I enter a tunnel of small trees and when I come out

there is the beached whale skeleton of a huge glassless

greenhouse on my right, majestic and pathetic, full of

weeds. Then another even bigger hangar-like greenhouse –

this time glazed, but almost empty. I stand in the doorway,

wondering if I walk in whether all the roof will fall like

melting ice … I’ve walked through glass once… I hit it

with my forehead and it was as if the inside of my eyes

cracked… I stand on the threshold – toppling into the

expanse of sunlit space – emptiness tangible, syrupy…

since I started walking my days are full of these spaces …

another near derelict one alive with chaotic plants and then

another, with missing panes, but in use and full of orderly

plants … the path leads past the owners’ home, but I don’t

call for some reason – perhaps it is too sad – the violet

industry was once a fragrant economy around Dawlish, a

brief trade in scent and colour, the transformation of such

27

delicate things into dead labour, into capital.. the trains full

of violet and the aroma of death, of empire, the purple of

priest’s vestments and damp vestries.

Down the hill there’s a

wonderfully dread entranceway,

but it’s to a private garden…

“MOTHER, soft and warm,

your love enfolds me like petals

on a soft red rose”

“Visitors always welcome” –

the church is locked.

“Waiting for redemption here

rests the body of Ebenezer Pardon”

under a stone pylon

I’m in the graveyard of St Gregory the Great’s – the church

I saw from the top and hoped was a St Michael’s and All

Angels, perhaps some old site of the worship of Mercury…

later I found out that for years the church was called St

Michael’s until someone looked at the records… but the

people knew!!

In the corner of the graveyard is the private plot of the

Hoare family – these are not local aristocrats, but Johnny-

come-lately seventeenth century capitalists, making their

28

big money in eighteen-century India Bonds – they have a

bank in the city that has its own artesian well.

Rusting grilles and crumbling stone around a manicured

interior, rotting with discretion, segregated even in death,

so much for the Great Leveller – I remember that I once

asked the famous medium Doris Stokes – passed over now

– if there would be an end to social inequalities after death.

Basically the answer was “no”.

“William Sage, Maj. Gen. In H. M. Bengal Army – a good

soldier and servant of the state for 56 years. He has fought

the good fight. Nepal 1815. Ghuznee 1839. Saugor 1857.

To the poor a brother.”

I walk along Barton Lane and then West Cliff Road.

Almost at the sea there’s an alley to the left and through the

gap I can see across the valley of the town to the seat

surrounded by that petrified forest with the buzzards

circling over the Christmas trees. I follow an elaborately

buckled metal rail snaking the sloping alley. I can imagine

the Walking Wardrobe pulling herself up here.

In the Railway Inn there’s “traditional Indian Cuisine –

with rice, chips or spicy spiral chips” – I have a few pints in

the Exeter Inn where middle-aged people are complaining

about the sun. By the Amusement Parlour a herring gull

swipes someone’s chips. Perhaps it’s incensed by that

strange combination – “amusement”, as if we’re taking

some sophisticated pleasure and “parlour”, like we’re being

allowed into a room opened only on special occasions?

29

In the grease layer just back from the beach there’s the

curdling mix of aggression and helplessness, pushchair and

football shirt. Yet, on the beach with my kids I love this

place. It’s so easy to be here. But, as usual, the working

class get let down – because no one will let them be

exceptional enough. Only on the beach where we’re all

stripped down to trunks and bras – where flags and logos

and clubs are partially voided - does the goodness come

through the fat and ketchup and the warmth is as strong as

the sun. Grandad Smith sat on the beach in a three piece

suit and trilby. He was an RSM in the British Army in

India. We had curry at home long before people went out

‘for an Indian’, my dad despised people who ate Vesta

Curry. One of the carved furniture pieces with swirling

plant decoration that Grandad brought back from India is a

small octagonal table that looks like the church in

Teignmouth.

I catch the train home

from a platform that once

reeked of violets. The Old

Station House at Dawlish

Warren is now a rectangle

of carefully raked beige

stone. It looks planned

now.

Next day I set off for Teignmouth. On the sea wall at Boat

Cove I ask an elderly angler what he’s trying to catch.

“Anything edible.” Up from the train set model front of

30

beach huts and concrete painted with obvious instructions

(where I’m due to be performing in Summer 2004) I zig

zag up the cliff paths. I’m almost linking up with West

Cliff Road again, but I cut left along the top, past a series of

bricked up and abused shelters and viewing platforms, dead

spaces it’s not easy to sit in anymore, like sleeping on

graves. There’s a limit to how many people can sit in a

shelter and after it’s used up the shelters discomfort new

visitors. T. S Eliot should have written The Wasteland in a

shelter in Torquay, his wife Vivien had convalesced there

from the same kind of nervous breakdown, but Tom went

to Margate and wrote it in a shelter there instead. So

somewhere in Torquay is a seaside shelter in which The

Wasteland wasn’t written.

After going through Stuart

Close, recently built large

houses with a florid castle

somewhere in there submerged

in the utilitarianism. Beyond

the Old Teignmouth Road,

there’s a path on the left, back

to the sea; a friendly bloke

chats over his fence and then

there’s a field full of sensuous

shapes, the ground humps and

mounds. At Smuggler’s Lane,

to one side, is an exploded

house. Down on the sea wall I

31

can see the Parson and the Clerk off Holcombe. I climb

down to the beach and once again I walk a winding path

defined by the in and out of the breaking waves.

One day when the Vicar of Dawlish and his Clerk had

finished collecting tithes in Teignmouth they set off back

home by the cliff path… or, no… they were visiting the

dying Bishop of Exeter with hopes of replacing him, after

what they felt was a successful bedside attendance they set

off back home by the cliff path… when to their surprise…

but, wait… sometimes there’s mist in the story and they get

lost despite their familiarity with the route… like a drift,

like the Brechtian verfremdem, the quotidian process is

disrupted and becomes visible… when to their surprise they

saw a house they’d never seen before – brightly lit and

ringing with the sounds of merry-making - and at its door

stood the host, beckoning them to join the party. No, it was

only when they got inside that they met him and even then

they never caught more than a glimpse of his form in

silhouette. The weather was cold and misty and they

accepted the offer of hospitality and imbibed freely from

the drinks they were handed. When it came time to go the

Parson, disorientated by mist and drink, inquired from his

host which way they should take. “I must have a guide even

if it be the Devil himself!” The host smiled and said he

would be their guide, leading them through the mist to a

road that was unfamiliar to the Parson and the Clerk.

Warmed by the wine, they set off at speed until they found

themselves up to their boot tops in water. Suddenly a

demonic shriek of laughter rang out and a great wave

covered them and dragged them out to sea.

32

The crazy house had vanished –

The breakers surged and ran;

And to the flanks of their horses

Clung master and clung man.

Prone on the rocks next morning

They stretched there, stiff and stark;

On one rock lay the parson,

On one rock lay the clerk.

Beaten and torn and mangled,

They clung with dead-cold hands,

While their horses wandered harmless

On shining Dawlish sands.

(p.20, West Country Ballads and Verses, Arthur L.

Salmon, Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1849)

A.L. Salmon.

Or next day two stacks of sandstone stood in the waves

where the men had disappeared. But… if they drowned,

who knew about that shriek of laughter. There are no

witnesses mentioned in the story and the Parson and the

Clerk were dead. So it seems that this story comes from the

Devil himself.

Look out for a house that isn’t there. Something like that

dead-eyed house coming in to Dawlish, ones that fade in

and out of existence: the old wooden shops and the Psychic

33

Hut at Dawlish Warren, the eyeless, burned-out old

people’s home in Teignmouth, the minaret towers of the

Redcliffe Hotel.

At Teignmouth I swam at the

Lido, where an attendant was

alternately feeding and hosing

down the herring gulls. Great –

now I was convinced there’d been

a qualitative shift in the relations

between humans and birds. I’d

started to watch the pavement for

their shadows – it’s a new layer –

the Kennely/Heaviside layer

above, then the layer of gulls, the

giant with one hundred eyes, then

my layer, then the layer of

shadows, the layer of Donald Crowhurst and shapes under

the water as if a great fish just shifted its bulk and the sea

shuddered… the layers beneath the surface Homer Simpson

fleetingly plunges through on an excessive bungy-jump –

Morlocks, CHUD, Mole Men – layers of sedimented story,

and I’m sliding through them – paranoia sparking just

enough to be enjoyable.

Cutting sharply inland across one of the bridges over the

railway I’m immediately in the badlands – DOGS

RUNNING FREE DO NOT ENTER – the tatters of a

necktie pinned to metal gates – what is this? Through gaps

it looks like it might be an overgrown ornamental garden.

Or somewhere thugs bring their business partners. Then

34

Dingley Dell – BEWARE OF THE DOGS – note the plural

- and I can see a derelict chalet and an overgrown caravan.

This cliff edge with its barbed wire, high fences and

derelict property is a wild west, a borderland, every wall

just a little bit too high and every gate a little too secure to

be innocent. Maybe the house was here and it’s blighted the

cliff.

I enter a green tunnel, squeeze through a metal kissing gate

let into a wall and double-back into town, through a

double-trunked tree into Mules Park, where mist is rising

out of the lawn and hangs in clumps. I feel the electric eyes

of Charles Babbage flowing from the windows, calculating,

processing binary space, spreading like mist across green

sloping lawns, like a film projecting over everything, like

an electrical spin passing through everything, ricocheting

off the Kennely/Heaviside layer and the layer of herring

gulls, the strange galvanism of unexpected images meeting

in a poem.

“Things all dis-jointed came from north and south;

Two witches eyes above a cherub’s mouth,”

This is John Keats writing in Teignmouth, nursing his

dying brother, Tom.

“Voltaire with casque and shield and habergeon,

And Alexander with his nightcap on;

Old Socrates a-tying his cravat,

And Hazlitt playing with Miss Edgeworth’s cat…”

35

No relation to Mrs Slocombe’s pussy I hope, but fear the

worst.

Beyond the Bolshevik uprising of vegetation in the walled

garden and the rectangular corpses of deceased tennis

courts looking a little like the incinerated station house,

there are the remnants of what seems to be a re-enactment

of The Wicker Man: swathes of grass yellowed by ritual

events that have come and gone, and the ruins of two

wooden structures, one barely standing and the other

collapsed, a chart of wooden bones, and then a dead tree, its

ribs stuffed with fabric birds.

On Teignmouth Pier, just before the Einstein-ian space -

“A COIN ROLLING REPRESENTS A PLANET IN

MOTION. AS THE COIN CIRCLES THE FUNNEL IT

HAS TWO TYPES OF ENERGY, ENERGY OF

POSITION AND MOTION. AS THE COIN CIRCLES

AND DESCENDS IT REPLACES ENERGY OF

POSITION WITH ENERGY OF MOTION. THAT IS

WHY A PLANET SPEEDS UP AS IT NEARS THE SUN

AND AS IT LEAVES IT SLOWS DOWN …THIS LAW

APPLIES TO ANY ORBITING BODY…”

…and beyond the smell of money from the Penny Falls

there’s a haunted pagan Babbage machine, a cruel hoax, an

automatic palmistry calculator: “Hold HAND down firmly

on the SENSOR PLATE until your FORTUNE CARD is

delivered.” I place my hand on the Sensor Plate and drop in

36

my small coin: waves of tiny metal stumps massage my

palm for a few seconds.

“YOUR Hand denotes a very fine temperamental

nature, but you have great ability, especially in Business

matters. You will discover easy methods of making

money...”

At other times Tom and Anjali also have

their palms mechanically read – each,

different, FORTUNE CARD is an

assembly of Barnum Statements, things

we like to hear or doubts to entertain

about ourselves. The cards are

unanimous about one thing: all three of

us will succeed in business, in a world

populated only by bosses.

At the Western end of the front, where the Inspector of

Nuisances would once patrol and where stood one of two

wormholes to Newfoundland through arches of whale

bones, there’s a lighthouse and then a second light further

inland on a pole by Lynton House; from the sea, when

these two lights are aligned, a sailor can judge the Eastern

limit of the Pole Sand. By two lights on land a shape

underwater imagined.

In 1966 Norman Wisdom made a movie called Press For

Time in the town, renamed Tinmouth. There’s a chase

sequence when Norman races after a bicyclist on a

37

commandeered double-decker bus. The bus driver must

have been a real bus driver because he behaves as if he’s in

a very serious continental film. When the chase was shown

locally it bewildered the audience with its geographical

leaps. I bought the video recently. When Norman alighted

at the station (somewhere else standing in for ‘Tinmouth’)

he leaves the station and reappears at the top of the railway

bridge road walking back towards the station itself. As if he

were caught in a loop. The editor had constructed a map of

time doors and wormholes.

On my way to my meeting with remarkably belligerent

gulls I walk the line of sheds downriver of the New Quay

(where Norman’s bus ploughs into the water). It’s a

monochrome, late 1950s, British B Movie world, British

Lion Films, in which nothing will be explicit, no music on

the soundtrack, not comedy but thriller, Jack Warner will

be firm, harsh even, as the detective who’s reaching

retirement, it’s probably directed by Lance Comfort or Val

Guest – this is the world I remember – of discipline, of

virtue in loyalty, in doing the job, of the skilled working

class recruited to manage, of a routine corruption so normal

it was surprised when it was pointed out, of the certainties

of a colourless world, of restrained emotions that weren’t

embarrassing, of having to be grateful things weren’t a lot

worse. I remember the mid 1960s black and white moment,

a bloke greeted my Pop in the city centre, he said: “They’re

prosecuting people now, Ted. I hope they don’t start

investigating me!” I asked my Pop who he was. “Lord

Mayor.” The individualism of the sheds is a perfect symbol

of a British empiricism, a Boulting Brothers plague on all

38

your houses opportunism, the refusal to fall for the lure of

theory, of self-reliance and pig-headedness… the thing I’ve

been carrying around and fighting in my head for forty

years…

In the town I saw a priest in a dog collar and I was sure he

was a counterfeit – a wandering bishop who had invented

his own church - a large, young woman on his arm – the

dog collar didn’t fit his shape and when I watched him he

stared back aggressively.

“Live Eels” said a big sign by the ferry.

“Do you mind if I ask what your

interest is?” someone said to me.

“SUPAWASH. We dodo duvets.”

That night I catch the train home and

there are men digging around the edge

of the burned rectangle at Dawlish

Warren Station – as if they’ve lost something. Maybe they

regret pulling down the ruin so quick. You don’t think the

archaeologists are in conspiracy with the demolition firms

do you?

Anjali and me caught a taxi from Dawlish Station up to

Ashcombe, near the source of the stream that gives

“Dawlish” (“dark stream” or “devil water”) its name. It was

from up here 200 years ago a hay cart was carried by the

stream down the valley and was last seen by fishermen

39

floating far out to sea, still intact, maybe a field of corn

growing in it. Where would it get to? Caught by currents

and Gulf Stream and tides and freak waves, would it

finally come to wash up alongside the Teignmouth

Electron, in the shadow of a never completed futuristic

Bubble House on a Cayman Islands beach? A wooden

bucket of accidental agriculture. Up the course of this

stream a party of Dawlish tradesmen, armed with guns and

bludgeons, traced the Devil’s Footprints through a February

night in 1855. Anjali is puzzled by the Devil, though she

was educated at Convent School near Bangalore she is

perplexed by a fallen angel with no redeeming features at

all. Total evil in one figure is something alien to the Indian

pantheon of gods. Rama, Vishnu and Shiva are three faces

of a shifting imagery in which destruction is all a part with

preservation and creation.

A tiny notice in the church porch takes us to a

small bungalow where a door is opened

narrowly and uneasily, but keys are handed

over uncomplainingly. The church is

dedicated to St Nectan, built on the former

site of “an old Celtic foundation.” St Nectan

was a Welsh saint who travelled to Ireland

and then was called to set his boat out on the

sea - to where he did not know. He landed on

the toothy coast of North East Cornwall and

made a shed for himself and lived as a hermit. A few weeks

before I’d been with Wrights & Sites ‘performing’ at the

Shed Summit at Welcombe Barton, Cornwall, where I was

accessing the myth of St Nectan, his church and well in the

40

village there. Ashcombe is the only Devon church

dedicated to him. An altercation with two robbers led to his

head being lopped off, at which he picked up his head from

the ground and walked back to his shed - foxgloves

springing up where his blood fell. Today his church is

white and colourless. Anjali is a little shocked by what she

sees as disrespect in the ill-kemptness of the church – but I

think she’s actually responding to something that happened

five hundred years ago, when Protestantism ripped down

all the images and whited out all the colours. Last year I

was given the Stephen Joseph Award by the Society For

Theatre Research to explore “Street Performance and

Public Ritual in 1830s to 1930s Exeter” and in the cool,

quiet of the Devon and Exeter Institution on Cathedral

Close it was to the complex clash of regional, national,

class and sectarian identity-making in an ongoing

negotiation around iconoclasm that I was continually

drawn. With few grand secular public buildings, with no

coherent vocabulary of dramatic, cinematic or any other

visual local language, the iconography of Devon is fought

over on the fringes of processions, openings and shuttings,

in street behaviour and cardboard antique gates. A leaflet

from the church says that a statue of the Virgin Mary now

appears at services, a remnant of the anti-clerical

destruction of the Spanish Civil War: a strange reciprocity

for the seventeenth century Iberian prayers said for the

nearby Lidwell or Lady’s Well Chapel destroyed by order

of Henry the Eighth. By then they were saying prayers for

an empty space.

41

At the Shed Summit I handed out pieces of modelling clay

– in the way a Hindu worshipper might pick a stone or a

piece of wayside clay and mould a momentary “ksanika

linga’, calling Shiva into it for a moment, then giving him

leave to go and dropping it again - asking people to shape

the clay into something like their head, so they could carry

another point of view with them, in their pocket or in their

hand.

Behind a curtain we find

a banner portraying the

martyrdom of St Nectan

in a childish and gory

parade.

On the road out of

Ashcombe a field is full of game birds. Then as the road

climbs, there’s a huge sign: BEWARE – PARTRIDGE

AND CHICKS - BEWARE – we’re not quite sure

whether this means we should proceed quietly in order not

to disturb a delicate bird or whether to expect a twelve foot

tall Partridge to suddenly stride over the hedge and peck us

to pieces. At the top of the food chain after the dinosaurs

had gone was a giant flightless bird. We tip toe by, but

nothing appears. Except in my head. We pass Ashcombe

Tower, a private house where they have Hitler’s private

telephone. On a gatepost is carved the sign - /|\ - that Mrs

Gordon calls the Name of God – “all worlds and

animations sprang co-instantaneously to being” – I’ve

never seen it on a private building before, it is an ancient

symbol of government, re-emerging as a mason’s mark on

42

public buildings – so why is it here? A mystery. The trees

close over our heads. I can see from the map that we are

walking between ancient graves.

We emerge from the funereal avenue of deep green, and to

our left opens up a basin of patchwork greens: this is the

Shire, the Tolkein bathing of England, it’s very quiet up

here. Yet, when I first came here there was a police car

parked with blue lights flashing in the crossroads, no horn,

it reversed suddenly when the driver saw me… my route

followed his retreat and he looked

sheepish as he fired the car past me.

One interrupts little dramas,

exposes the workings of things that

are invisible at other times. I kept

looking over my shoulder for the

car chase.

At the very top is Haldon

Aerodrome. There are still the

remnants of the old Aerodrome

Club House, torched by Hell’s

Angels in the 1970s, a concrete floor and a fireplace. I

looked for signs of the re–fuelling area, but all I found was

that something had formed a huge circle pattern in the

shading of the vegetation in the body of the aerodrome –

the kind of thing you see in ‘this is where the UFO landed’

photos, a giant fairy ring or some huge fungi growing out in

a ripple… I kept coming across brochures warning me

about “Alien Plants”…

43

“Alien Invader What you need to know. The Law. The

Wildlife and countryside Act has made it illegal tospread Japanese knotweed.”

(Environment Agency)

“Top naturalist accuses ‘wildlife fascists’A leading naturalisthas accused hisfellowconservationists ofbeing “ecologicalfascists” for trying toeradicate alienplants and animalsthat threaten nativespecies… “Naturehasn’t the slightestrespect for species and racial barriers,” (RichardMabey) said. “Evolution has always been a matter ofchange, of moving on… of miscegenation, symbiosisand partnerships of all kinds.”

(The Independent on Sunday 6.7.2003)

… there was nothing to see close up, but a pattern moving

through the gorse from afar... like the field I would later

come to along the way to Torquay. Frank Muir was the

commanding officer here during the war. The first

aeroplane to land was delivering Peter Hoare to his home at

44

Luscombe Castle. Close behind were the Honourable

Richard and Lady Florrie Westenra arriving to move in to

their new home in Bishopsteignton. Their planes had blue

fuselages and golden wings. In 1931, worried about lack of

radio contact from her husband’s yacht somewhere in the

Mediterranean, Florrie set out with the local professional

pilot, Bill Parkhouse, in a DH80A Puss Moth, routing via

Farnborough, the Rhone Valley and Montelimar – my Nan

would eat chocolates called Montelimar – until they found

the Honourable Richard in a port on the Riviera.

Crowhurst sent false reports of his journey. No one knew

he was in trouble. No one went to search for him and fetch

him back. He was off somewhere a lot further than the

Riviera. He was travelling along the curve of relative space.

Three months before she died of influenza Winifred

Spooner landed her Moth and folded its wings. At the Air

Rallye, after “Bombing the Submarine”, racing around

pylons, wing walking, and before the exhibition of “Crazy

Flying” the runners up trophy for the Teignmouth Air

Trophy Race was presented to Colonel Strange. The girl

parachutist Naomi Heron-Maxwell landed safely. And one

half of the Western Brothers was on hand. “O, you cad!”

Oswald Moseley landed, fleeing Plymouth where people

had thrown rocks at his plane as he took off. When the

Nazis threatened to invade, the beach huts at Teignmouth

were carried up here and laid out along the runways as

traps.

“Japanese knotweed

45

Fallopia japonicaCase against: Introduced in the early 1800s; spreadcountrywide by the 1960s… the Government hasspent millions trying to eradicate itCase for: Mr Mabey is “relaxed” about the “attractive”plant… In cities it supports many native insects.”

The Independent on Sunday, 6.7.03

We could see Haldon Belvedere from here, and Hay Tor.

These were the markers of a triangular course for the races

on Air Day. Sacred geometry. Contemporary estimates of

the crowds vary from thirty thousand to sixty thousand.

And we could see down to Bishopsteignton, and ‘Old

Walls’, the Bishop’s palace woven into the farm buildings.

You can go and view it – just ring farmer Ken Dawe at Ash

Hill Farm – Teignmouth 775844. Athelstan, the ethnic

cleanser of the Britons, built the palace to celebrate his

defeat of King Howell (hence Howell Road) at the battle of

Haldon Hill. Round these parts there’s the story of the

Whisht Hounds, heard but never seen, hunting the souls of

babies, or, some say, they’re the souls of the babies

themselves, jet black, with burning coals for eyes. At

Cockington an old lady recalls hearing their whooshing and

roaring outside, but no one goes to look. Is this some guilty

memory of Athelstan’s troops removing Celtic families as

their Saxon neighbours stayed indoors and tried to tell

themselves it wasn’t happening, that it was just the sound

of the Wild Hunt passing by?

46

The way down is a path of flints. Like the path of rocks

from Oddicombe. Even on a wet day it speaks of dryness

and bones. The rock exposed here is just under the skin all

the way along the arched backs of these Little Haldon Hills.

The path becomes more and more loaded with dread and

apprehension. A gulf opens up on the left, a parade of trees

on the right. The flints point us into a field of long trouser-

soaking grass. The ruts in the ploughed field nibble for a

turned ankle. We stumble with the ruins in the corners of

our eyes. A couple of iron gates and there is the chapel of

the Mad Monk. And there – in the floor of what was

consecrated ground, the well still remains – the location for

a Japanese horror film – down which his victims were

stuffed and from which their bones, according to the Sites

and Monuments register, no reference to a source, were

recovered, though R. H. C. Barham “who should have

known better” claimed that anything dropped in the well

would slip under the Teign and reappear in Kent’s Cavern.

The tiles from the chapel floor disappeared into the keeping

of Dawlish Men’s Club (founded 1880) which in its turn

has disappeared. The murders, denied by sceptics, were

recovered by Romantics. A single wall of the chapel stands,

like a hungry one-eyed monster. The Monk would lure

women to the chapel, rob them and throw their bodies

down the well. Or he would disguise himself as a traveller

and rob the wealthy. Or he was a child-murderer from

another place. Or a rapist from Gidley. Or he was a clerk at

Lidwell whose ideas became unorthodox, defamed the

Bishop and was declared a ‘satellite of Satan’. Or was

thrown down his own well by a devout sailor who, raising

his eyes to heaven in prayer, saw the monk’s shadow, knife

47

in hand, on the chapel wall above – those gulls flickering

like knives across the pavement. Or he is a jumbled

memory of the violence to the chapel itself – by men of

puritan religion who hated the voluptuous curve of an

image, the rich colour of a symbol, the sumptuous sheen of

an imitation of flesh. Or maybe something older. History

stretching and distorting him like some kind of monster, a

patchwork, catch-all evil. The place is pulled and bent in

the same way – a 1980 photograph of the ruins that

revealed a complete chapel has in its turn, apparently,

disappeared. Stones from the chapel interweave with those

of Lidwell Farm – as if this were a place where certainties

have disintegrated – as if these places of evil cannot hold

their own forms, but borrow and burrow others. In 1894 the

‘Transactions Of the Devonshire Association’ recorded that

“after the suppression of the chapel this well was found to

contain a large number of human bones which it is affirmed

were those of women and young children.” But no

reference. There was never any parish for this building to

serve so was it always, like St Thomas in the wild, a

suppression of an older place?

In “Issue 9” of TeignScene I discover that the Wicker Man

remnants are the detritus of “public art works”. Apparently

“traditional designs”, their genealogy is ghostly, a suitably

gothic transplantation. Their in-authenticity is perfectly

self-haunting. The fiery pictures in the municipal magazine

look lukewarm, the marks and fragmentary skeletons rising

up without them, from a grave of bogus tradition.

What official, but malevolent force lures the explorer now?

48

And if they found the bones of the victims, where is their

treasure?

Is it in the landscape?

There is something evil up there. I don’t mean a demonic

force – but a very human, frighteningly human, deliberately

chosen attempt to re-make the lives of others in the image

of a bleak landscape – Hitler’s telephone still sending out

its electromagnetic orders, the ancient eroded shapes of the

burial mounds of the Old Ones looming through the damp,

dark trees along the pre-historic Port Way, shadows

drawing back from the ancient route for weapons and

cutting tools, the splintered Earth on the lawn of Ashcombe

Tower, Hitler’s poodle landing in flight on bare strips

rescued from the gorse, above the sharp flint layer, the

arrogance and self-deceiving totalitarian dream, a shadow

image of the big sky imaginations of those aristocratic

women flyers and skydivers already connected to the vast,

ancestors of the artist Tacita Dean whose art works of

eclipse, bathing, futuristic ruins and the shell of the

Teignmouth Electron in the grass teeth of the cayman

beach is an answer to the absence of a great woman

landscape artist, refusing to “snap off a chunk of visual

experience, disconnect it from the continuum” (p40,

Germaine Greer in Tacita Dean, London: Tate Gallery

Publishing, 2001), the hated-saint Athelstan’s pack of

Whisht Hounds, both the souls of babies and their

destroyers, an evil palace of contradictions built into farm

walls, where the people of Teignmouth fled to watch their

49

town burn in 1690, where some accounts float the Devil’s

merry-blazing house that entertained the Parson and the

Clerk, the exclusiveness of the golf course and the hostile

suspiciousness defining space by those who are not its

members, a sad pall across the real friendliness of – I think

it was – the Club Secretary who guided me over the course

– and the Mad Monk, child-murderer and thief, who turns

the disguise of an ‘empty’ place into the desolation of

murder and greed, stilled the mouths of children for the

sound of leaves jittering in the wind and the gulping of

water in the well as a body sinks. It is here. It is now. This

is where the Devil’s Footprints lead – right into the hearts

of real people who reached and reach deep down into the

well within them, and twist the most human and 50,000

year old modern capacity to bring one thing to another into

the destruction of human, chattery, wandering, laughing life

by making it a dead, silenced landscape.

Go to the top of the Little

Haldon Hills. You can face

it down.

Soon after my last foray up

there I was eating scallops at

the Ness House Hotel, the

water sweeping down the

Teign outside, the same that swept Crowhurst out. Scallop

shells were worn by pilgrims, like the one in the poem The

Hunt of The Pilgrim by Lawrence Palk, MP, son of the

Palk who built the Belvedere: about a lost soul, wandering

in the guise of a pilgrim, two Whisht Hounds at his horse’s

50

feet, luring travellers onto his mare, from which you can

never dismount, but are condemned to hunt a phantom stag

across the moor forever – we watch the closely studied

mutating sandbanks in the mouth of the Teign, monitored

by cameras, their flat images mutated into another

viewpoint at the Coastal Imaging Lab at Oregon State

University where “the application of complex geometry

computers are used to transpose the oblique camera images

into map-like plan views. (Like aerial shots.)”

Donald Crowhurst was born in India in 1932. His father

was a superintendent on the North Western India Railway

Railways – “up country” where Colonel Smith had lived.

Crowhurst wrote in his log at the very end of his life:

“Alas, I shall not see my dead father again… Nature does

not allow God to sin any sins except One – that is the sin of

concealment… It is the end of my game…”

In the RAF they called him “Crow”. “To the extent that he

was religious, his religion was scientific precision; if a

thing was true, it must be supremely logical. It must

compute.” When Crowhurst stood, successfully, as a

candidate for councillor his election manifesto was in the

form of a computer programme – with multiple choice

questions, the logical answers to which led inexorably to

Donald Crowhurst: “Liberalism computed.” But all this

train timetable logic was struggling with another part of

him – the part that took him up onto a lonely hill above

Nether Stowey mixing blood with a friend, seeking Black

Magic powers. He had “that kind of over-imaginative mind

51

that was always dreaming reality into the state it wanted it

to be.”

Did he think there was some magic to be conjured by

circumnavigating the world – just as a devout Hindu

circumambulates the image of a god.

And yet… under-prepared – he had only gone a short way

before he realised he would never be able to get all the way

round and those parts of him – the logical, empirical, train-

timetable Englishman and the part up on that lonely hill

that led him to take Albert Einstein’s ‘General Theory Of

Relativity’ along with lots of curry so he could understand

everything in the wilderness of ocean - began to liquefy and

redistribute themselves. And, like a god, like a hero, he

could not let the logical part of him, the part telling him he

could not succeed if he did not journey each and every mile

of ocean, defeat the part of him that knew it could discover

and understand everything from each and every part of

every ocean, no matter where he might be.

His deception would have been called fraud if tried in a

court of law, but in the courts of science and heaven

Donald Crowhurst was seeking a bigger kind of truth. His

tragedy – triggered by hubris – is that the parts were not

connected to the whole. There was no self-organising BZ

reaction to re-catalyse, nothing against which to sediment

the patterns that dissolved as soon as they formed. The

“computer” that Crowhurst designed to trigger a special

self-righting mechanism should Teignmouth Electron

capsize turned out to be a cardboard box of switches, relays

52

and transistors that he hadn’t had time to assemble. Wires

ran from gadgets and devices all over the boat to a hole

under the red cushions of Crowhurst’s seat. When the boat

was found drifting empty in the Atlantic, its skipper

missing presumed drowned, the seat was lifted. The wires

ended only in a tangle of themselves. There was nothing to

process all the information. Crowhurst had lost the

controlling centre; but, in gnostic transport, he had no

pattern to save him, no anti-catalyst to right him in the

water.

He was not a freak. He was an ambitious man, trying to

leap over his own limitations, to scale over the details to the

bigger picture, imagining a programme for everything. To

connect all the switches and wires without a self, link all

the caves in one arcade, all the waves in one ocean of mind.

Tragically, his way to do that – and he’s not the first - was

to reject the human mess for an inhuman spirituality: “the

‘world’ will ‘end’ (I believe about the year 2,000, as often

prophesised) in the sense that we will have access to the

means of “extra physical” existence, making the need for

physical existence superfluous.” “I have felt a community

with long seafarers,” Crowhurst had said, but he was

preparing to cut himself off from it.

The Parson and the Clerk – or perhaps their impostors, for

some say the originals have disappeared into the sea -

watched him go. “Why do I go?” he asked. “Because I am

certain that our life is but the twinkling of a star and can

only be characterised by beauty, which is eternal, and not

53

by its duration which in eternity is so short as to be

meaningless.”

His publicist had wanted “Miss Teignmouth 1968” to ride

out on the Electron until just before the starting line when

she would leap from the bow and swim to shore.

Oliver Heaviside, the physicist and mathematician believed

in an even more devastating end of the world, but by

describing it theoretically he turned it into something

creative and physical: “All known disturbances,” he wrote

in ‘Electromagnetic Theory’, “ are conveyed either

electromagnetically or gravitationally. If the first way, the

speed is finite. If the second, it may also be finite, perhaps

with the same value. Assuming then that all disturbances

are conveyed at finite speed, it follows instantaneously that

the destruction of this wicked world may come at any time

without warning. There is no possibility of foretelling this

calamity… because the cause thereof cannot give us any

information till it arrives, when it will be too late…the

theological, metaphysical, legal, moral, and pecuniary

consequences of this indeterminateness of knowledge… are

tremendous. But practically I do not think it makes any

difference.” (p.386, Electromagnetic Theory, Oliver

Heaviside, London: Spon, 1951, first published 1912.)

When he realised he couldn’t get round the world

Crowhurst redefined the race as how far he could push

himself. He sailed in circles in the Atlantic while radioing

reports, bouncing off the Kennely/Heaviside Layer, of a

54

fantasy journey. But he began to feel that the real and the

false journey were now accompanied by a third.

For a moment, not long before the end, he seems to achieve

something; integrating consciousness and relative space…

but immediately it collapses into gnosticism and ‘pure

thought’: “We can bring it about by creative abstraction!”

he writes in his log. “If the shark rubbing itself on the

bottom of the boat got me today it still would not matter.

The solution would not disappear… Mathematicians and

engineers used to the techniques of systems analysis will

skim through my complete work in less than an hour. At

the end of that time problems that have beset humanity for

thousands of years will have been solved for them.” Then

he cuts his line with the material world – “It is finished – It

is finished. IT IS THE MERCY” – probably severing the

safety line he has been dragging behind the boat in case of

a fall overboard, for a moment words, disembodied, had

seemed magical, but that magic failed him, as it fails

everyone, and addressing god directly the log ends mid-

sentence… only physical destruction is left. He probably

leapt into the sea with his Hamilton chronometer in his

hand. Taking time with him down the wave curve of wet

space.

It’s our cheat. Not Crowhurst’s. He should have been able

to return to Teignmouth and say: “ I lied, but I am a hero –

my journey around truth was psychological and

geographical – it was psychogeographical - it was both –

let’s all grow up.”

55

Because of him, we can all walk the journey that he

pioneered for us, without the fatal risks, rather than the

world we can circumambulate an icon of it; it might be a

building like the Redcliffe Hotel, it might be a rock on the

beach, a burned out old people’s home. “…we all spend our

days blithely in the context of the ancient and the distant .

The buildings around us are built from ancient sediment…

The ground that we stand upon is an archive constituted of

the distant past. The evolution of life is embodied in every

face we see… We are the products of processes that are in

general so slow compared to our lives, that it make scarcely

any difference to the way we live if we are totally ignorant

of them … My father, alone in a small boat and struggling

for a metaphysical position, was in a sense lost in time… If

all we do is laugh, we may miss something.” (A practical

approach to mapping time, Simon Crowhurst, in Tacita

Dean, London: Tate Gallery

Publishing, 2001)

In Shaldon there are these small

rowing boats filled with earth and

flowers. There’s one on Marine

Parade. This was a boat that was

used on the river once, for dealing out the nets when they

drag the mouth. One day it was stolen by a lad in the town,

who later became famous as an entertainer and plagiarist.

He stole the boat because he’d heard there was treasure in a

cove inaccessible from the cliffs, protected as a site of

scientific interest. In the boat he packed a bag of earth and

some seeds in case he needed to explain his digging. He

56

had hardly got beyond the Ness when his companion,

appalled by both his seamanship and his lack of morals,

jumped ship, like Miss Teignmouth might have, and swam

for shore. In his panic the companion had knocked the bag

of earth into the bottom of the boat and trod the seeds into

it. When the rower saw what his friend had done he was so

upset he cried. And when his tears fell on the half-buried

seeds they sprouted into flowers and before the young man

could row out of sight, beyond the Ness, he couldn’t see

out of the boat for the jungle of plants. He became confused

and began to dig in the earth. He knew the treasure was

buried in there somewhere, but couldn’t remember quite

where it was supposed to be. The last anyone saw of the

young man he was floating far away from the cove that he

had intended to plunder, he was digging fast and furiously,

sure that every spadeful brought him closer to the truth

about everything, expecting at any moment

a sudden rush of revelation that he would

treasure all his life.

In the “The Best Little Zoo In The West”

the Prevost Squirrels run down grilled,

elevated tunnels like characters from a

Tokyo-influenced sci fi movie. I’m sure the

Kookaburra is laughing at me - “hahaha,

scared of seagulls, hahahaha!” Bloody

birds, they all know!! In the first room of

cages the door to the zoo’s office is open,

and I peer in just like the other displays.

Through a tunnel is the Ness Beach. Under

57

the cliffs there’s a rowing boat; filled with sand and rubble

by the sea and the crumbling overhang. A man sunbathes

dangerously.

The first time I tried to walk along the coast to Paignton I

retreated to the Conservatory Restaurant at the Ness House

Hotel, scared first by gulls, then by bullocks that wouldn’t

shift from my path at the top of a very steep field. I had no

appetite for getting downhill of them in case they bolted, so

I struggled over a barbed wire fence, a bramble bush and

then, scratched and humiliated had to sprint to avoid racing

traffic on a pathless road. It had been a banal, pathetic,

cowardly journey – yet it had revealed a wonderful little

copse of trees, the wind knitting their trunks and drawing

the curtain from their twisted mesh of roots. And now I was

able to choke on some Marston’s Pedigree and watch the

Pilot at work in the mouth of the river, knowing that at that

moment the slow transforming of the sandbanks were being

videoed from the sides of the estuary mouth, This video

system monitors the “evolution of the sandbars and the

coastline in response to waves and tides. The five camera

array is called an Argus System... from the Greek

mythological giant with a hundred eyes.” This system is

one of a network – including Hawaii, USA, Holland,

Australia, New Zealand… all data is relayed via modems,

through telephone lines, to a computer at the University of

Plymouth and then to the world wide web. I liked sitting

there, eating the wonderful food and imagining the erosion

spreading around the world all the time stretching and

twisting.

58

A robin flies into the Conservatory Restaurant and perches

on the back of a chair. A spy for the herring gulls. On the

ferry across the estuary I feel like Tippi Hendren. I’m

crossing the route of Donald Crowhurst’s Teignmouth

Electron. I’m always crossing these paths and routes. Up on

the Haldon Hills it’s the routes of the lonely victims of the

mad monk. All the time I weave in and out of the Devil’s

Footprints; appeared one Thursday night in the snow of

winter 1855. Some said it was a German swan carrying a

donkey’s shoe, others that a sea monster came out the water

at Totnes and crawled to the Exe.

Back home on the train. Two men are now erecting a wire

fence around the rectangle of rubble on Dawlish Warren

Station. The shapes in the pancake batter, the imprints in

the 1855 snow, the eightfold geometry of St James the Less

and at Dawlish Warren Station – the ‘Old Station’ house

had become a shape; at first a rectangle of rubble, burned

wood and fragments of personal possessions, each day it

becomes more abstract, like an archaeological record. Bron

Fane (Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe) revealed in a pulp

paperback that the shapes in the snow were made by the

weapons of the ufos of the shadow Negons hunting the

heroes of his novel who, in a space-time craft, had escaped

to 1855:

“The disc ship spun like a gigantic coin flipped by a

gambling gargantuan... There was a rift in the clouds… and

as Zelby dived low again to evade the withering fire of his

pursuers the South Devon countryside opened out like a

great white and silver panorama… Topsham, Lympstone,

59

Exmouth, Dawlish and Teignmouth… and the heights

above Starcross in the west were visible like the wings of a

settling cosmic predator… “Look out” here they come

again!” shouted Elspeth… The grey white pencil-weapons

raked across the clouds… “we’ve cleared up one of the

world’s greatest unsolved mysteries!” said La Noire… “the

Devil’s Footprints .. Now we know what caused it... those

pencil weapons of the Negons…” (p.150 – 157, Bron Fane,

U.F.O. 517, John Spencer, no date)

Z worlds… I see I’ve written in my notes: “Symbolically,

the temple can be seen as a complete world” and so can

these little places… in which I keep meeting these gods and

monsters – Argus, Ganesh, Mister Punch, the Sea Slater…

The next day I set off back up the Ness, up the steep climb,

skirt the bullocks and, after a week of, for me, hard

walking, super-sensitised, scared of bullocks and paranoid

of gulls, under-hydrated, I felt weaker that I have ever felt

before, except for illness, and I knew I was entering a new

place for me, an unfamiliar sort of weakness… I sort of

know what I’m going to see, but as I climb the hill and my

heart beats faster and faster and my head gets lighter and

lighter, now I’m not sure what limits there are on this

journey and where I come out at what other side.

A field or two beyond Labrador Bay car park – where Nan

and Pop would stop to look at the sea before the last few

miles into Paignton - by the way you are not allowed to

walk your dog in LABRADOR Bay! – I find the field of

healing curves, yoni-like, and it’s giving me darshan,

60

within its folds, a circular shape overlaps long ferns in the

ground and once again I wonder how this shape comes – a

goat on a chain, expanding funghi, a ufo landing, an ancient

site? Columns of thistle rise up within and across the

circle’s edge, like a Venn diagram. A pile of shorn thorn

bush branches lies nearby. The whole field is threaded with

animal paths, veins or water gunnels. You could take a

picnic and spend a whole day there, reading that map.

I walk down a green tube of trees. Thistle lingum reminds

me of the concrete columns in the electricity sub-station.

There’s a house called Bun’s. At Maidencombe beach a

middle-aged couple react guiltily when I bid them good

morning – I guess they’re married, but not to each other.

I’m writing the seaside novel in my head. The

archaeological remnants of a concrete walkway lie in bits,

like a fallen dragon’s teeth. This is a wonderful place for

gentle contemplation of the disappearance of the post war –

that I found at Lake Balaton.

Along this way I’m indistinguishable from the conventional

hiker. I should have brought my red and white détourned

ranging rod. It rules by a different measure. It’s not the

straight rod of the archaeologist or map-maker, but equally

its unequal red and white segments set it aside from the

rough staff of the rambler. The shapes – in the pancake

batter, the eightfold geometry of the church, the prints in

the snow, the ‘Old Station House’ rectangle, the Venn

diagrams of thistle - become more abstract, more like

archaeology.

61

Watcombe beach in June is almost deserted. I sit on the

rocks stage right as the deep dread water clunks below me

full of huge monstrous lobsters and crabs, silkies and

mermaids. A guppy fish slithers across a rock. First the

lapping water stirs with urgency as if a great body had

shifted its weight out of view, then water broke on a rock

like the thing had lifted its head. The second time I came,

there were bratwurst and kalamari for sale at the café.

The top of the combe is like jungle. I remembered the Art

Trail that had foundered along this way, like the

atmospheric railway before it. I’m sure there are lots of

other ghost trails, like the one the Parson and Clerk

followed to the bright, dead-eyed house in the middle of a

nowhere.

“In Memory Of Basil and David Who Loved This View.”

Oddicombe beach I get down to on the Cliffside railway – a

week later it jams and smacks a tourist’s face into its glass.

The sound it makes is like the Tardis travelling through

time. There’s a brief moment of ‘darshana’ as the sea looks

into me – it opens its blue curtains and closes them again.

Then off the railway to wonderfully redundant beach huts

and the great collapsed whale shape of a cliff stranded and

decomposing on the far end of the beach. I walk along an

ascetic rock path – like I’m now in Pasolini’s Oedipus

Rex. A couple of pints and some crab cakes at the Cary

Arms and I can hardly get out the door let alone up the

sharp hill to Babbacombe. There’s an optical illusion from

the window of the Cary Arms – what appears to be a rock

62

bridge on the other side of the bay is an upturned D of rock

in front of a sheer rock face, the empty space is not there.

Vision, cliffs, houses on Dawlish Warren, the flights from

Haldon Aerodrome – they all fade and pass. Everything

turns liquid as I stagger up the hill.

I wonder if crabs are like lobsters. If they cannibalise the

first to moult their outer skeleton. Can you imagine that –

sitting around with your friends…watching, waiting,

wondering if you’re going to be the first one to split their

armour? Some lobsters get ‘lazy’, they stay in the same

hole and never move, eating what food falls their way,

slowly growing into the shape of the hole, stuck. Which

one am I becoming? Or am I like the lobsters kept in

floating keeps until the market price gets high enough?

The manager of the Babbacombe Theatre is uncertain

whether to allow me to photograph his box office. “Are you

local?”

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

MR PURSHOTTAM H. BHOJANI 1897 – 1988

MRS. RATENBEN P. BHOJANI 1908 - 1992

“Insert money and point at view. ATTENTION. Do not

point at the sun. Patent pending.”

On the seat in the shelter it says: Wotch Yor Backs. While

I’m using the telescope a bloke I smiled to earlier comes

over. “Clear day today,” he says. “I can see Exmouth,” I

say – at a loss. “You can see right out to Portland Bill.” Is

he trying to pick me up? On the promenade I walk behind a

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young woman who is wheeling an aged person of

indeterminate gender who is screeching repeatedly “Mum!!

Mummy! Mum!!” The falsetto is so intense, the emotion is

mythic, archetypal. I’m in a tragedy and I want to do

something – but that’s the point isn’t it?

Sticker: “A Parliament For The English!”

An elderly aproned man is spooning water from a boat in a

hotel car park.

Heading into Torquay, there’s a strange concrete lingum

just off the road – what purpose it once served I can’t

imagine. Maybe the council erected phallic symbols in the

1960s? In 1981 Teignmouth unsuccessfully tried to stage a

topless beauty contest at the Carlton Theatre (it was

cancelled like the Press Conference for Donald

Crowhurst’s return at the same venue) and – equally

unsuccessfully – topless waitresses were briefly serving at

the Georgian Two Restaurant. 231 Babbacombe Road is

called Timeless House.

The second time I climbed the hill up to Babbacombe I was

fitter. I was walking with Tom. And we were joined by a

man named James who’d walked from Dorset. We’d seen

him pass us while we sat in the café at Maidencombe and

I’d said to Tom: “very serious”. He’d stopped and talked to

two couples we’d said hello to. He told us the men were

former marathon runners who had switched from running

to walking and were joined by their wives for a short way

(my Mum and Dad do that) – news of each other ripples up

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and down the coastal path. We saw a sign for Kent’s

Cavern. The little 1930s wood and brick entrance building

is as much a part of the archaeological record as the bones

and teeth of the hyena, bear, rhinoceros and elephant,

reindeer, wolf, lion, woolly rhino, mammoth and bison

collected in the dark and the damp by the frail Catholic

priest John MacEnery – his find of a man-made flint

arrowhead and the tooth of an ox under two feet of

stalagmite floor, which accumulates at a few millimetres a

century, disproving the literal interpretation of the book of

Genesis. 80,000 artefacts. The mud and rock dug out

become the car park. Some of the rock is wet like offal. The

black on the stalactites is human skin and grease. Beyond

The Long Arcade, at a sort of cave crossroads, our Guide

takes replica bones from a wooden chest. She takes out a

little piskie skull and shows it to the children. Or is it a

memory of the small, dark Picti? Then our guide takes out

the cast of a Neanderthal skull, bigger eyes and smaller

brains, and compares it with one of our party - yet, we

should be careful: for these people were not inferior

versions of us, but parallel evolutions from the same

source, walking the same world on a parallel path,

occasionally crossing ours. We’ve found necklaces they

made and their stone tools have been found in Kent’s

Cavern. They were not imbeciles and but for certain

climate changes it might have been a Neanderthal guide

showing Neanderthal children the skull of a Human and

making jokes about tiny eyes and obese brains. When they

died it cut us adrift. “We are unique and alone now in the

world. There is no other animal species that truly resembles

our own… The birds were cut off from the rest of the

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vertebrates 65 million years ago, when a cataclysm wiped

out the dinosaurs, or rather all the dinosaurs but the birds.

Our own isolation is much more recent.” (p.3-4, & p10,

The Neanderthal’s Necklace, Juan Luis Arsuaga,

Chichester (UK): Wiley, 2003) So here we are – adrift,

alone, Crowhust-like, walking between the bones below

and the dinosaurs above.

The guide talks of modern people arriving from Africa

50,000 years ago – “what’s the difference between them

and us? – not a lot” – for there was a creative explosion

between 50,000 and 30,000 years ago, when our minds

stopped being like a Kent’s Cavern with one chamber here

and another there, each a place of separate specialisation:

knowledge of animals, sex, memories, etc. Instead they

became like one Long Arcade where all our knowledges

could meet and make new patterns. So if I have made some

odd connections in this narrative I have only been doing the

thing that makes every human on this planet what they are

– putting 2 and yellow together and making a lido. The

same evolution that Donald Crowhurst conducted on

himself in the middle of the South Atlantic. Combining

animals with humans with things. An “anjali” is a gesture.

(Place the hands together, slightly cupped, fingers pointing

inward and then raise them to the

bowed face.)

The guide turns off her torch and in

the pitch black she lights a mixture

of moss and fat in a scallop shell and

in the brilliant light I remember the

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scallops I ate at the Ness House Hotel. Coming up Kent’s

Lane we rejoin the Babbacombe Road when from Lower

Warberry Road on the right, there’s Oliver Heaviside on an

unsteady bike, his feet on the front fork, trailing unpaid gas

bills and rate demands. Except for these crazy forays on his

“new fangled machine “ he lives like St Nectan, a hermit at

Homefield, with all the wonders of the world in his head

growing like foxgloves. Heaviside Calculus is still used by

pure mathematicians, in those inner landscapes of

abstraction. There are craters on Mars and on the Moon

named after him. The glove of ionised particles around the

Earth bears his name. He won’t hear you if call out to him.

And he probably thinks you’re out to get him anyway. He’s

slightly paranoid. He contests anyone who pooh poohs

maths and equally any mathematician who wants to

disappear into an ocean of only pure maths. For all his

loneliness and isolation, Oliver has gone there to keep

everything together. A Crowhurst with a self-righting

mechanism, setting out to reconcile the mighty forces of

electro-magnetism with the soft caress of gravity, taking

the first trip towards a theory of everything.

Abstract thoughts – like a piece of flint embedded in old

sediment – change everything.

I cut right before I reach the Strand where, at number 13 a

dead child was once delivered by post. The mail delivered

by Whist Hounds.

“Crab! Crab! No more now to be had!

In the street or beside your own door;

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You will sorrow in time, when all of you find

That I cannot bawl “Crab, crab!” more.”

Then towards Old Mill Road, Seaway Lane and Hennapyn

Road. There was a strange exploded stain on the side door

of an old house. I seemed to be passing through a

swallowed village. I cut across a road and I was in a

country lane. At a turning I found a hotel being converted

into flats – it had been the house of William Froude. In the

roof he built a tank of water for testing warships in model

scale, he formulated his Law Of Comparisons – how the

bigger can learn from the smaller – then built another tank

over in the Old Mill Road. Within these apparently

conventional middle class homes wind storms raged and

freak waves rippled, lofts became oceans and sheds

commissioned navies.

At Hennapyn Road I cut down an unsigned path, a quarter

inch of wood from a growling dog and out into a jungle of

beautiful weeds. This heavily camouflaged public footpath

brings me out next to Livermead House, the former home

of Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley.

Rudyard Kipling wanted to run through Torquay wearing

nothing but his spectacles.

Hercule Poirot was an asylum seeker here – a Belgian

refugee seen by Agatha Christie. In the “trash” of Agatha

Christie the “world conspiracy is thwarted by an alliance of

the good, which knows of no ethical distinction between

British and oriental men and women.” (p.307, Agatha

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Christie and Archaeology, ed. Charlottte Trümpler,

London: The British Museum Press, 2001) The novel is

called ‘They Came To Baghdad’. At the bottom of

Livermead Hill ‘La Rosaire’ looks empty and ‘house from

Psycho’. I look around for the shelter where Eliot didn’t

seed his anti-semitic wasteland. I cross the road and take a

left down a road signed “cul-de-sac”. Often the

psychogeographic walker slides phantom-like through the

ends of these no-through-roads. Steps down to a beach,

with the arches and castellated shapes of the Livermead

Cliff Hotel on one side, on the other, around layers of

barnacled rock, the water gulps in a gulley, beneath a rude

sandstone outcrop with steps up to a PRIVATE sign from a

world of B movie deserts and guns. Phoenician traders

maybe landed here, taking tin from Dartmoor and leaving

behind the recipe for Clotted Cream. Or was it the

Egyptians? Everything is from somewhere else. The only

sure thing about identity is its uncertainty.

Sometimes I am walking

like the Walking Wardrobe

of Dawlish. Putting on dress

over dress over dress.

Feeling that at any moment I

might open the door and,

through the fur-lined inside,

feel my way back to Narnia.

At the furthest Paignton

beach, Broadsands, Monty Python filmed a gigantic electric

penguin with arms like tentacles terrorising bathers, then a

cupboard with ferocious teeth came out of the sea and

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chased Carol Cleveland up the sands, the spines of cactus

plants removing her clothes one by one (reversing the

Walking Wardrobe). BZ.

I saw a concrete ball in a front garden – clearly it had fallen

from the top of a gatepost at some time. It reminded me of

summer evenings in Delaware Road, Coventry, playing in

the sinister twilight with my friends… I read a story in a

comic book of a tiny ball suddenly floating down to earth

which when it was examined turned out to be a miniature

planet, devastated on one side by the landing. And

somehow I’ve remembered that the planet

landed on a friend’s front lawn in our

road on a summer’s night and every time

I see a concrete ball it takes me back to a

time that never happened.

This wanting to find those old childhood,

holiday, Devon feelings…. we make a

completely new world out of our

memories… I wanted to find some of the

wonderful things I knew were just over

the Nostalgian border – that routine

fetching the newspaper and saying good

morning to all the same people, sitting on the beach in suit,

shirt, tie, and trilby. But I didn’t find my memories. Early

misty morning mackerel fishing in my rust red jumper.

Feeling a glow inside like the lighting effects in The

Greatest Story Ever Told. That world – other than the odd

dusty window display – had gone. Its order has turned sour

and withered. And so had my memories. I should have

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attended that meeting of the Teignmouth Useful

Knowledge Society in 1853 on ‘Memory’. I wandered in

Paignton and I couldn’t remember any of it. I knew I had a

memory of it, but I wasn’t actually remembering it. As if

I’d never been here, it had slipped away.

But all we need is the odd. I had found all these layers. And

the glow is still there, stratified. Living in the ruins of

utopia right now. A fallen planet you can catch in your

hand.

So much of the Redcliffe Hotel is missing too; the minarets

have gone, the echoes from the Qutb Minar Mosque –

perhaps there’s still a resonance in the shape of the

windows? The ripples from the Jami Misjid and the Red

Fort have receded, although the military crenellations of the

ballroom reminded Anjali of the Red Fort, and the Prayer

Steps, reputedly oriented towards Mecca, are still there. It’s

as if Colonel Smith had been a Knight Templar returning

from a holy land, suspected of “going native” and

smuggling Islam (or something even more secret) home in

his architecture and, like all those stories about old belief

lingering on within the official one, more is guessed from

what is not there than what is. Like all my walking to

recover something from the past. Each missing layer

plucked away on the spines of cactus plants in hotel

gardens.

But Nan and Pop weren’t

missing. They were here. I felt

the presence of their love. The

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adventure, the safety, the warmth inside the cold out on a

misty, shaky sea. But I couldn’t find it HERE anymore.

Finally, with Anjali, I did go and knock on the door of one

of the guest houses. One last try for memory.

I wasn’t going to call, but there was no lunch available at

the Redcliffe Hotel – and, as we came out, I thought - why

not? So Anjali and me made our way over to the

guesthouse where I’d had those happy childhood times…

When Isaac Singer – ‘builder’ of The Wigwam (the

grandiose Oldbury House where Isadora Duncan made love

to her bitterest enemy under the piano) and father of the

Paris who bought Colonel Smith’s house – came to

Torquay two local families would not sell land to such a

“flamboyant” businessman – was that code for “Jewish”?

As Anjali and me made our way up the drive I suppose we

might have been mistaken for a couple looking for a place

for the night.

After all, if you believe them, people will tell you that

another Smith – Colonel Smith – had a secret Indian wife

in Redcliffe. Why do they think she would be secret?

I ring the bell.

“um… this is a bit of an odd request…”

“I’m VERY busy…”

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“O…”

“Wait there …two minutes…”

And he goes and we stand there. I think of Nan and Pop

and coming here and I start to feel the presence of the place

and I feel some tears coming a long way off that I push

back. I can’t reconcile the happiness of the memories and

the abruptness of this. I can’t put

together the security I know I once felt

here and now this hovering on the

doorstep, excluded. He comes back.

“Right. I’m very busy…”

“Um, well my name’s Phil Smith and

I’m a writer and I’m working on an

autobiography…”

He reacts, but I plough on.

“…and I came here a lot when I was young and I wondered

if we could quickly have a look round…”

He shakes his head.

“No. You’ve chosen the busiest time – I’ve 8 to 10 hours of

work ahead of me…”

Anjali and me are going: “oh, right… right… o, well…”

and retreating down the drive. Perhaps he thinks I’m

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another John Cleese, but why is he acting like Basil Fawlty

then?

My head is chopped off – like the decapitated ghosts of Old

Lime Avenue, Torquay – but an elephant head grows in the

place of mine. I know

now this has never been

an autobiographical walk.

The memories I have are

not just mine. Not just of

the past, not just of Nan

and Pop and Jeff and Joy.

Although I’ll always love

my Nan and Pop and remember them and wished I’d loved

them more and better when they were alive and wished I

hadn’t left my Pop with sharp words the last time I saw him

alive. No, this walk through nostalgia is a walk into the

future, a pioneering wander through the familiar, only to

find everything changed and full of endless wonder. But the

wonder looks back at you, looks into you, and you look

back at it.

A confectionary fish disappearing up a drainpipe.

A four foot high bottle of milk on a gatepost.

The musical notes on a choirmaster’s gravestone.

Even the paranoia about the herring gulls has now become

a parable for the sensitivity to all sorts of things this kind of

walking gives you– at St James the Lesser the bible on the

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lectern was open at the previous day’s reading: Jeremiah,

chapter 15, verse 3: “And I will appoint over them four

kinds, saith the Lord: the sword to slay, and the dogs to

tear, and the fowls of the heaven… to devour and destroy.”

You know, even with those bloody fowls of heaven, I had

begun to enjoy watching their shadows move across the

pavements I was walking on.

Inside every holiday is another holiday. Later, no, before,

on the outskirts of Paignton, alone, I picked out an

overgrown path, in the long grass I climbed up hidden steps

made of railway sleepers, and entered into a liminal, border

world, which I wasn’t quite sure was garden or wasteland.

Eventually I left behind the backs of houses and burned

mattresses and for the first time in all my walking I could

hear no cars. Only insects and water and birdcalls and a

rippling sea of greens and yellows. I disappear into the

pattern of a butterfly. Holiday. Holy day. My random

fluttery routes helped me avoid the predator. Here the giant

partridge cannot get me! I chopped myself up into the

parcels of a huge field on the other side of a stream, lain out

like landscape in the eye of a bird, it took me four

photographs to get it all in. I began to feel all the

experiences of the walking becoming a field, a map,

something I could fold up and put in my inside pocket

(touches heart) and take home with me. I begin to see

where the different routes connect. Donald Crowhurst’s

yacht to those rowing boats full of flowers, pulled up and

waiting. Filling up with meaning. Shells waiting for the

right hermit. “If only it could have talked!” Chips Barber

wrote. St Nectan carrying his head. The Electrons leaping

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in the Kennely/Heaviside layer. I felt I could leap like them

and not fear where I might end up.

Ganesh is the god of overcoming obstacles. A dish of

sweets is always at his side.

The deeper one goes in, the more likely one is to pop up

just where one wants to be.

I emailed Anjali a little while after we’d finished our

walking together. I’d realised that those crab shells we

found weren’t the casualties of any gulls. The crabs had

slipped out of their old carapaces and that was what we

were finding. Like ghosts the living things had slipped

away, hardening again somewhere else.

I left my shell behind… the boat on the beach, the lazy

lobster growing its extended organism into the world, the

electron leaping along the ionised layer….

“Tat tvam asi”.

That’s how you are.

Under the Redcliffe

Hotel there is one

remaining wonder – a

whitewashed tunnel,

from what is now the bar, sloping down to the sea. At the

beach end on the left is a room where sound does very

strange things, and in there I found two prehistoric sea

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monsters: Sea Slaters in their armour, creatures from the

time of dinosaurs, things that I thought were going to leap

at me if I got too close. And they can move with great

speed. In the icing sugar castle I had come eye to antennae

with time before the kind of memory I was trying to recall

and it was living on the walls of a capsule that clanged and

shimmered with sounds like that of a universe ringing as it

is born with no one to hear.

The year has been different from previous walkings – it has

been a year of mythogeography, of making more and more

connections, of riding a web across the city and swinging

on its threads into the county beyond, learning to ride its

graph-like cross-hatching slopes and to feel its bubbling,

magma-like, ghostly dimension of probability suddenly

pushing virtual particles through the smooth gradients of

curved memory.

“…we may press our analogy a step further, and ask, since

our hypothetical worm and fish might very readily attribute

the effects of changes in the bending of their spaces to

changes in their own physical condition, whether we may

not in like fashion be treating merely as physical variations

effects which are really due to changes in the curvature of

our space; whether, in fact, some or all of those causes

which we term physical may not be due to the geometrical

construction of our space.”

(p.201-2) The Common Sense Of The Exact Sciences,

William Kingdon Clifford, London: Kegan Paul, Trench &

Co., 1885)

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An1887 march of working class students from St Luke’s

College - “(m)ost… had come from British or Board

Schools” (p.256, The History of Saint Luke’s College,

Exeter, Fuller, F., Exeter: Saint Luke’s College, 1970 ) -

against the poor standard of the maths teaching and the

disciplining of their leaders, became stalled at the Fore

Street Tavern Assembly Room, the marchers unable to

spread or theatricalise their cause.

Mythogeography is about walking a local history of the

physics emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth

century: the smooth rolling valleys of Relativity with their

webs drawn up around great ornamental concrete balls –

worlds fallen to earth in 60s sci fi comix I read then, but am

in now. And when I access that memory I can walk as a

line drawing, as a two dimensional Flatlander, slipping

between things, sliding over the graph-mounds, virtual

history popping through me without injury, seeing my

edges ‘pulled’ into new shapes by the mass about me – and

then the quantum path like a FunnyHouse at the Fair, like

dancing with ghosts on a bouncy castle – the absolute

predictability of surprise. A walking that is also a militant

protest alongside those working class Exeter boys. (“Why

don’t they tell you this?” says a student on the Site,

Landscape and Performance module at Dartington College

of Arts after I’d given a quick half hour talk on Relativity

and Quantum Non-Locality – demanding a transitional

programme of access to a scientific culture already almost a

hundred years old.)

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Mythogeography is about walking a physics of local and

marginal histories. It’s about the trashed angel statue in the

St Thomas graveyard, about the stories as we walk, about

the huge guardian dog that was never made for the spire.

Rupert Sheldrake speculates in The Physics of Angels that

angels might be conscious stars – “Materialists believe that

our own mental activity is associated with complex

electromagnetic patterns in our brains. These patterns of

electromagnetic activity are generally assumed to be the

interface between consciousness and the physical activity

of our brains. Consciousness is somehow supposed to

emerge from these patterns. But the complex

electromagnetic patterns in our brains are as nothing

compared with the complexity of electromagnetic patterns

in the sun.” (p.18, The Physics of Angels: Exploring The

Realm Where Science and Spirit Meet, Matthew Fox &

Rupert Sheldrake, Harper San Francisco, 1996) Encounters

with angels, with the cultural shapings they take, are a kind

of astronomy. We become walking radio telescopes. The

white statues with their great wings roll down the mounds

of space. We come face to face with massive bodies and,

simultaneously, with a gossamer, unrespectable ‘just

knowing’ (the memes of Mercutio’s Queen Mab) -

“…angels know through intuition, according to Aquinas…

and they can assist our intuition… Intuition is the highway

in which angels roam….” (p.2 The Physics of Angels.)

Human identity pleasurably fragments somewhere between

shapely physics, the complexity of the sun and the

boomingly kitsch pseudo-psychological iconography of

angels. In there is a pleasurable space – a

mythogeographical playground - for coming apart and

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spreading around? Where conscious stars materialise, not

just as angels? In Gustave Doré’s engravings for Dante’s

Divine Comedy the angels fragment, atomised, like

electromagnetic descriptions of Near Death Experiences,

the time tunnel the battleship passes down in Final

Countdown.

Mythogeography is about walking in cultural space. Of

being aware that the complexity of planet Earth is reliant,

for its stability, on the massive expanses of emptiness in the

cosmos: “A universe that is big and old enough to contain

the building blocks of complexity will be very cold and the

levels of average radiant energy so low that space will

everywhere appear dark… If we were to smooth out all the

material in the Universe into a uniform sea of

atoms…(t)here would be little more than about 1 atom in

every cubic metre of space.” (p112-3, John D. Barrow,

The Constants Of Nature, London: Jonathan Cape, 2002)

It is walking the emptiness – gratefully – dancing from

atom to atom, metre by metre, aware that the complex map

is an exception, bought at the ‘expense’ of galaxy after

galaxy of almost blank ones. It is knowing that everything

has been bathed in cinema history just as much as physics.

And that the next step is a walking of everything, a walking

of fields rather than bullet paths: “I’m walking backwards

for Christmas, across the I-rish sea.” A stepping backwards

out of identities and into the deep sea of strings.

It is walking in the absence of the Neanderthals. Walking

with their memories is a service of remembrance. 1945.

50,000 BP. The Neanderthals were with us all through our

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change to cognitive fluidity. And then, 28,000 years ago,

they were not. “North of the Pyrenees, the more modest

canines of the polar fox, even smaller than those of the

common fox, were the most popular. They were perforated

at the root for stringing. The Neanderthals of the Grotte du

Renne and Quinçay used them also. It seems they saw

something special in the artic fox that escapes us today.”

(p.297, The Neanderthal’s Necklace)

Mythogeography is a Third Space itself, beyond, or rather

beside hybrid, a place on the route of intuition, dread and

ambience. Mythogeography is an underwater local history

of space and time, riddled with wormholes – through which

to “magically pop out where you want to be”.

Phil Smith