ORCHID Chronicles Part 10 – ‘TIME PASSES – LISTEN – TIME PASSES’

Where do you want your ashes to be scattered? After your death, I mean. Not from the grate. Or, for that matter, where do you want to be buried?

Something we have to think about. We’re all going to die after all and we may or may not have time, let alone faculties on our death-bed, to work it out at the last minute.

‘Lay… me… in…’ – and it’s too late. Where? Clover? Swan’s feathers? The river bed? Which river? On that hill he loved? But which hill? The sea? At sea? From the beach? Off the cliff? Or in that lovely churchyard – but which churchyard, he not being a regular church-goer who never left the village where he was born? Etc.

My parents had it all sorted long before the moment of truth. 

My mother chose Golden Cap, the highest cliff in Dorset, where we had been forced to clamber up and down from tiny tots to however old we were at her last scattering, the wind predictably in the wrong direction. So we swam it off in the sea afterwards, teeth chattering with the cold and yet full of that strange exhilaration you only get at funerals, despite or because of the grief.

My father was buried in the old Catholic churchyard in Beaminster, the village where my grandmother lived, my parents got married and came back to live in their final years. Not because he was a Catholic but because there his grave lifts up its eyes to his favourite hill, Gerrards, which, like Cezanne’s Mont Ste-Victoire, he painted many, many times, with Lewesdon and Pilsdon looming beyond. They called it ‘Peace for Evermore’ because, on one of the stand of beech trees up there, bearing the signs of age now, there is a tree with ‘Peace 1902 Boer War’ carved into the bark. In the way beeches do, it had stretched its smooth, grey skin over the years and in the first flush of their courting days, they had misread it as ‘Peace for Evermore’. And thus it remained in myth and family history.

So it’s worth thinking about beforehand.

I’ve got my 68th birthday coming up and I’ve already used up a few lives along the way. Not helped by bicycles, cars, falling lamp glasses. Falling lamp glasses?

Yes, I was walking along a street, in Edinburgh, I think. Following the cracks between the paving slabs as you do, OCD or not. And I turned sharp left, as that’s the way the crack went, just as a huge, heavy glass globe-thing fell from the street lamp high above my head and smashed down exactly where I would have been if I hadn’t done my OCD thing and turned left. Don’t think there’d have been much left of my little egg-shell skull, already fairly battered, if I’d been underneath it. 

Let alone all the other scrapes and bashes and near-misses in general. Including Martin’s Gate. And my fondness for a glass. And fags. 

How on earth am I still here, I often wonder? 

Maybe partly because, one way or another, ‘the green air of grass’, as I described it on my long walk in Part 7, purifies one from some of the muck, a little bit at least, maybe, despite all my inexcusable contributions to it. The muck, I mean. But it’s mostly luck, and Gill’s good veg, of course. Unlike too many others we’ve known along the way.

So – where? A couple of places immediately spring to mind.

Dancing Ledge on The Isle of Purbeck. Now there’s a spot to mix with the aether. To dissolve into the short-cropped turf hanging there above the Dorset spume and evaporate back up into the grey, sweeping Dorset skies – or blue and fluffy from time to time – now that’s a good way to join ‘the brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire’, as Shakespeare said, in his bitter-sweet muse on our ‘quintessence of dust’.

Hamlet’s speech: ‘What a piece of work is a man’, whether recited to wolves by Withnail or quietly to oneself in a crowded place or to an audience to whom weapons of mass destruction are just the day job, has a particular resonance. 

I once played the poor, procrastinating, conflicted, ur-melancholy young man in the beautiful surroundings of Stourhead Gardens, learning the long, lovely, many, many lines in a bluebell wood just outside Wincanton, where we lived at the time before we got married. 

I would love to have another crack at it. 

Sir Ian McKellen is going to do just that, so they say, at the age of 82. So maybe age is not a factor when it comes to musing on the ironies of how we squander and abuse the gifts of our potential in reason, faculty, form (and moving), action and apprehension. ‘The paragon of animals’? Maybe not, given the mess we’ve made of things over the millennia. 

On 2 April, 1982, an Argentinian force landed on the Falkland Islands over which they had been claiming sovereignty for many years. 10 weeks later an estimated 650 Argentinian military  and civilian personnel, mostly raw recruits, were dead, 323 of them killed when the Argentinian cruiser, the Belgrano, was sunk by the British nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror, outside the 200 mile exclusion zone.

Three Falkland Island civilians and 255 British servicemen lost their lives in the conflict, which lasted 10 weeks, from 2 April to 14 June. An additional 1,188 and 777 Argentinian and British personnel were classed as ‘non-fatal casualties’ and, undoubtedly, many more suffered life-changing trauma as a consequence.

Gill and I watched events unfold, disbelieving, dumbstruck at this throwback to another era and witnessed both the hideous shock as the Exocets struck and then, at a concert in a country house we’d been invited to down the road one evening, the cheering from the dinner-jacketed guests, as the news came of 323 ‘Argies’ going under the surface of the ocean, never to return.

Those on the Belgrano had no choice as to where to be laid to rest, as in so many times and acts of war. But ‘Tin-pot Generals’ and ‘Iron Ladies’ aside, let alone the general toll from the bellicose of history, how many millions have been sent to die for what hindsight so often reveals are spurious reasons? Often cloaked in a ‘do-or-die’ rationale, Saddam Hussein’s famous ‘WMDs’, sold to us by Blair and Bush, is just one example from more recent times.

To escape the madness, we decided now would be a good time to hunt for something we had never seen. And down Dorset way, up on Dancing Ledge at the end of April, beginning of May, apart from the sea, the sky and the end of the world, lies one of Dorset’s little-known treasures and one of our rarest orchids.

We found it first, Ophrys sphegodes, the Early Spider Orchid, on 27th April 1982, among the workings of the old Portland Stone quarries down at Winspit, comprising East and West Man, just down the hill from Worth Matravers. 

We took off from our home at The Golden Pot, just above Alton in Hampshire, with a full complement of friends and family in our cavernous old Citroen CX Familiale, heading South towards the New Forest, hungry for that first magical glimpse of Corfe Castle that would tell us we were ‘nearly there’.

Walking down from the village of Worth, as we’ve done so many times now at the same time of year, the air is alive with birdsong, unless it’s raining. We have heard nightingales, I swear, with witnesses to prove it. But cuckoos – cuckoos cuc-kooing everywhere you turn, with larks above, invisibly following you down towards your quarry, in both senses of the word.

The path narrows if you head straight down for Winspit as we did that first time. For Dancing Ledge, you travel across a series of switchbacks , heading South-East, until you reach the cliff-edge. But that first time, down we went, funnelling down on the well-worn path to the bare floor of the old quarry workings.

When you haven’t seen something before, you have no real sense of what you’re looking for – until you see it. And then…

Just like the bee, but with pale green sepals, rather than pink, there is this furry brown spider, its fat little body buried head first into the flower, with pale markings on its back, like the tabs on the collar of a Victorian Presbyterian minister. 

We were enthralled, marvelling at this tiny thing, sometimes in little clusters, sometimes on their own, invisible until you knew what you were looking for.

Whereas at Dancing Ledge, on subsequent visits, you’re descending towards the cliff, rabbits skittering away in all directions. A train whistle shocks the air – where from you wonder? Too late for Spiders, perhaps, this year, you think. Not for the Thrift though, or Milkwort, in its antiseptic shades of pink and blue. And a Painted Lady, floating by like the ghost of Marie Antoinette. But no Spiders.

Then suddenly, there, the little dark brown body, too spider-like to be true. Another, more. And there they are, cascading down the hill before you, before green stops and blue begins.

Looking closer, you see plants with older flowers where the brown has faded to a pale faun wash. But those in their first flush have a rich, russet brown with a soft, velvet texture, marked with a smooth, slate-coloured π, or H, even X shape, at the centre. These pale marks lie between two hairy haunches, the whole flower set in the half-star of the three yellow-green sepals, with the two shorter petals set between them above the spider’s head.

While you are crouched down, examining the flower, the whistle pierces through again, which gives a clue to a couple of other things that prove irresistible in this limestone outcrop on the Dorset coast. One being the full steam ahead Swanage Railway from Corfe to Swanage and back again – hence the whistle. The other? The Square and Compass’s, of course.

I first went there with my grandmother when I was a small boy, presumably to stop for a bite of lunch on our way to or from Beaminster in West Dorset, where she and my Great-Aunt Eva had lived since 1928.

In the same family since 1907, from one Charlie Newman to another, four generations on, the Square and Compass’s (or ‘Sqump’ I’m told it’s known as to the locals) thrives, I’m glad to say, providing a wide range of wonderful local ciders and perries, soaked up by home-made pasties which have been a long-held tradition. And for the curious, Mr. Newman has created a fascinating museum at one end for his and his father’s fossil and artefact finds over the years. 

In the old days, when the quarries were alive with dust and hammering, sending their slabs and blocks to build The Mall up London way, people used to pay for their beer with a ‘Purbeck Penny’, a stone coin, of sorts. A slab of 24x30 inches would be worth a pint in 1900, so they say, although I can’t see my little 4 foot 10 inches Granny hauling that from her handbag on that day in 1958 or so. 

As for the railway, I defy anyone to tell me they are not seduced by a massive engine, alive and leaking steam, water and oil from every orifice. From the moment the guard’s whistle blows and the green flag waves, you embark, imperceptibly at first, on the gathering progress that will take you in a smutty fume from inertia, chuff by chuff, into a cantering quickstep and thence to a full-blown gallop and just heaven. 

Happiness is a hot engine and an old weather-beaten carriage buffed up to hold time still at 1955, or thereabouts, as you chickety-chuck, chickety-chuck your way from anywhere to anywhere with just a huge smile on your face – and the splot of ice-cream you haven’t noticed on your chin.

So with cliff and sea and Early Spider to share my last vestiges, plus the bonus of the feet that pass over me, carrying me with them for a special pint in a special pub and a ride on a steam train on their way, Dancing Ledge is not a bad resting-place it seems to me.

But one other place comes to mind which holds its own contrasting magic, yet with some key traits in common.

I told the story of our youngest son Sam’s tragic encounter with a rare beast by the side of the D16 to Vimoutier in Normandy in my last offering to these chronicles. It was this very creature, unintentionally cut off in its prime by Sam, the rare cross between the Monkey and the Lady Orchid, or, just possibly the Military Orchid, Orchis militaris, that raised those particular antennae that tell you to look around. For where one orchid grows, you are very likely to find another.

Sketches of orchids in France

The joy of all orchid hunting is not just seeking out an elusive rarity, raved about in the many books on the subject, that you plot and plan and map out your quest to find. It is, in many ways, much more exciting to stumble on unexpectedly, by sheer chance, being in the right place at the right time, and yet with all your senses telling you that Something Special might be here.

Such a place and such a time occurred one late April, the 25th, in 1989, on one of our reconnaissance trips to Normandy before we actually went to live there four months later.

Not only did we find the first Monkey Orchids, the Orchis simia we had seen since a plotted, planned and mapped out trip to Park Gate Reserve in Kent in 1983, but something about this spot, just off the busy country road in the depths of the Pays d’Auge, told us it would be worth scrambling up the rocky, limestone scrub to see what might be up on top.

Our introduction to Les Moutiers Hubert, later reached by a more accessible track, was a revelation. Up on top was a secluded, unmolested area of grazing, its short-turfed pasture bathed in South-facing sunshine.

We realised almost immediately that we had stumbled on a near enough unique combination of the perfect qualities required for fulfilling an orchid-hunter’s dream. As we walked up the slope, levelling out as we reached the top, we found ourselves knee-deep in Eden.

There, amongst the brilliant blue Sage and scents of Thyme and Chamomile, we found the Man, the Burnt, the Early Spider, Green-winged, Lady, Early Purple and Twayblade Orchids, some only just emerging, others in full bloom, some fading. And in such careless profusion, clustered here, a single one there, then whole colonies, often at different levels on the slope according to variety. It was dizzyingly breath-taking. And for once, even I was lost for words.

Over the next four years, we came back at different times over the Spring and into Summer and, with each visit, more treasures revealed themselves to us. I described the scene on a return visit I made with an old friend from our time in France, in fact Sam and Amy’s teacher, Philippe Marécaille, in the little École Primaire in our village in Tordouet.

This is what I wrote, recollecting in the (variable) tranquility of the boat journey back to England on the night of 13th June, 1996, after performing a one-man play to a corporate audience at the swanky Casino de Deauville earlier in the day.

‘Et b’en, voilà! Thank God I knew it backwards, nevertheless… (I was performing in English while being simultaneously translated into French, never an easy gig if you’ve ever had to do it) And then I fled and lunged on down to Tordouet, to knock on Philippe’s door and say – I have no time (I had the evening boat to catch), I want to share something precious with you. Je suis à la recherche des fleurs perdu (mixing my literary references somewhat). And he came. Two cars, flooding through the sumptuous green in one smooth swathe. And we reached Les Moutiers Hubert with its maison de maître, bat-haunted salle and all, not forgetting the fresh-water langoustines at the lavoir straight out of Louis Malle’s Milou en Mai. So up we climbed in companionable ease through the green flush, me half-dreading that the cattle would have been let loose too soon and wreaked their natural havoc, but they had not. And it was paradise. Pyramidal Orchids like Monet’s palette. Fragrant and Bee Orchids dancing with Thyme and Sage, with that outrageous blue blushing to an internal scarlet as it recedes within. And then – the Lizard Orchid, as outrageous as its name. That great, long, and at the very tip, forked tongue, flickering at the core of our twitching sensibilities. The red spots down the creamy throat only serving to enhance the ‘love me, lick me, at-least-notice-me-and-pay-me-compliments’ of the thing. Philippe marvelled in his quiet, Tarkovskian way and we wandered on listening, for a stretch of chosen immobility, to the crickets rubbing their thighs in an impossibly Flamenco joy at the warmth and light and stillness, egg-yolked in the falling, early evening sun. And then we broached the crest and – there they were. Late Spider Orchids, Ophrys fucuflora in all their fantastic diversity, like obscenely rich Medici women at a mock-Venetian or Venusian ball. And then it went surreal as Philippe recalled a dream of a monk leaping down a hillside such as ours in sheer effulgent joy, the jester-monk, the clown-saint, at one with his transcendent gaiety. Which triggered off a memory of a poem I wrote once on a hillside in West Somerset in which I described the shadow of a lurking monk, a troubled soul, in contrast to Philippe’s bonny friar. And then he talked of Borges and who dreamed of whom and whether childhood memories are conjured by the living dead, because we have nothing else left to dredge. And if we, indeed, were the living dead, or the dead brought to life, each dreaming of each other on the same hill with the same flowers and the same stories in opposing mirrors, receding back forever and ever and ever.’

Near the top of this paradise hill at Les Moutiers Hubert lies a little cave. It’s cool, gives shade and has an old ash tree growing just above that droops its lower branches in a curtain of swirling arrow-headed leaves as you look up and through it to the sky.

But if I am torn as to whether I should like half my ashes scattered here in France and half at Dancing Ledge, there is another reason, other than birth and distance, that might tip it towards the Purbeck stone.

I quote from a diary of 1998, when I walked down through Dorset to the coast in the latter half of May. It was a cool, overcast day on 22nd, with Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ thrumming through my head as I made my way past the still active St. Aldhelm’s Quarry on a loop designed to get me back to the Square and Compass’s for a welcome lunchtime pint.

‘There is a swift above my head, or a martin perhaps, unhappy because I have trespassed into its home. Which is extraordinary. It is an ancient, isolated chapel, dedicated to St.Aldhelm. It is square with four corners to the four points of the compass. It has one window that points South-East, its narrow, round-topped aperture encouraged by the wide-opening stone surround inside. It is cold inside and smells of very damp earth and stone, with mildew and verdigris on the simple yet beautifully carved pillars. There are fresh flowers – yellow roses, lilies, daisies. The altar is plain wood with a simple Gothic arch motif in panels and there is a small simple cross on top. The ceiling is, again, simply but beautifully vaulted. I must leave the birds in peace. Then two women enter. A mother and daughter perhaps. We talk and the mother mentions ‘The Anchoress’. ‘What’s an anchoress?’ asked her daughter. ‘Someone who assists or serves at a ritual’, replied her mother. ‘Or a priestess, even’ I suggested. The mother continued, ‘Well, someone discovered, not so long ago, a great stone, under which there was a skeleton. This became known as the mortal remains of The Anchoress, who had chosen to live in complete, contemplative isolation in a cell attached to the chapel and when she died, she was buried under the stone. I leave and go and sit on a bench dedicated to Dennis R. Clark, 1922-1986. ‘TIME PASSES – LISTEN – TIME PASSES’ reads the inscription. There is pink mallow, wild wheat, purple viper’s bugloss, yellow rattle around me, running to the edge of the cliff. A jackdaw suddenly plummets vertically down over the edge in front of me. It’s very still. Just the distant, muted roar of the sea below and one bird, a lark, invisibly high above me. And then, a beautiful deer, a roe, gets up 15 yards away – hops, stops and looks dead at me, 20 seconds or more, then quietly and serenely, hops away. I go over to where her shape still moulds the grass. I bend down to touch and sniff. It has no scent.’

Enough to keep one happy for a millennia or two, I would have thought.