The Crab Walks

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, 2

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 3

was about ten. And for a couple of days I’d live in offseason 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 4

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 5

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 6

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 seasmelling 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 8

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 9

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 10

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 11

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. 12

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., 13

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 BeluosovZhabotinskii 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 16

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 freefloated ‘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 18

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 19

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 snakelike 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 20

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 21

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 22

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. 23

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 24

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 reddishorange one. There are Christmas trees being grown just 25

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 26

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 Johnnycome-lately seventeenth century capitalists, making their

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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? 28

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 29

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

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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. 31

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 32

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 33

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…”

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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

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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 36

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 37

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 38

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 39

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.

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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 41

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”… 42

“Alien Invader What you need to know. The Law. The Wildlife and countryside Act has made it illegal to spread Japanese knotweed.” (Environment Agency) “Top naturalist accuses ‘wildlife fascists’ A leading naturalist has accused his fellow conservationists of being “ecological fascists” for trying to eradicate alien plants and animals that threaten native species… “Nature hasn’t the slightest respect for species and racial barriers,” (Richard Mabey) said. “Evolution has always been a matter of change, of moving on… of miscegenation, symbiosis and 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 43

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 44

Fallopia japonica Case against: Introduced in the early 1800s; spread countrywide by the 1960s… the Government has spent millions trying to eradicate it Case 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?

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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 trousersoaking 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 46

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? 47

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 48

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 49

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

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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, traintimetable 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 51

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

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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

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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 midsentence… 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.”

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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 55

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 56

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.

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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, 58

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, 59

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.

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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 61

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 62

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 63

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 64

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 65

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; 66

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 67

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 68

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 69

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 70

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 72

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 73

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 74

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 75

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) 76

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 78

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 79

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

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