seemed to be there for his benefit alone. It was as if they were
actors striking up a tableau whose meaning he was supposed to guess,
as if they were not quite serious, only pretending to know he was watching.”
So feels the musician character in Ian McEwan’s ‘Amsterdam’ novel as he covertly witnesses a couple arguing in the isolated beauty of the Lake District.
I read that part last night lying in bed, and it made me tingle in recognition of a similar experience I had about three weeks previously in ‘the wilds’ of the local countryside.
It was a sweltering hot day and I embarked on one of my usual nature rambles along the Staffordshire Way – it was just after lunchtime on a Thursday and I was prepared as usual with the essentials for outdoor survival: spicy Nik Naks, Tuna sandwich, bottle of squash and a notepad and pen. Strangely I forgot my camera this time.
After about a mile from my village, as you exit the long bridal path, there’s a lane which takes you onto the main road to the adjacent village, and just before that, the stile to reconnect with the rest of the public footpath.
Instead of automatically swivelling to the right on this day, I stood and pondered for a while, just listening and letting the countryside envelope my senses.
It was so quiet, no cars, cyclists, aeroplanes, other walkers – just a few bird tweets springing up every now and then. It was beautiful but a bit unnerving.
At times like this I often like to imagine I’m in some Sci-Fi movie, maybe Charlton Heston’s version of the Omega Man.
After a couple of minutes, I decided to take the left fork for a change, remembering that the local country house - Chillington Hall - was only ten minutes walk down the lane. I used to go past it a lot in my younger cycling days, and for some purely random reason had missed it for a few years by taking other routes.
Maybe all that aristocratic opulence had been a turn-off - lets face it there isn’t anything more blatant in the local countryside that reminds you of the class division in England.
Odd really, or maybe not: Mother Nature and Daddy Big Bucks in a strange symbiotic dance. (Maybe the Big Bucks thing has long gone though eh, thank god for the vulgar but essential tourist trade.)
Anyway, I came to the main entrance gate of the Hall, and sat down on the exquisitely manicured ‘grassy knoll’ to the right. This gave me a great panoramic view of the hall in the June sunshine. I was like a little aristocrat myself: liquid refreshment, finely sliced tuna sarnies and the exotic delight of hand-rolled foreign tobacco…otherwise known as Golden Virginia.
I’d been there for around ten minutes, leaning back and just smelling the breeze and ruminating on the social history of the place – visualizing a black horse-drawn carriage rumbling up to the Hall in ages past – when my reverie was rudely interrupted by a crass reminder of the modern age: a big motorcycle engine, bubbling and whining its way into my little Eden.
‘Twat’ I sighed.
The biker had pulled up at the other gate over the road, behind me. I was thinking, ‘please leave me alone’, ‘let me return to my tranquillity’, ‘don’t talk to me’.
“Takes your breath away doesn’t it!”
Oh God.
I turned to see a small chubby, shaven headed guy (or balding) in his late fifties, dressed in regulation Black Country sun-seeker attire: Ice wash cut off denim shorts, white basketball shoes, white socks and proud beer-belly spilling out of the tight vest.
It was the equivalent of D-Day in the vulgarity stakes.
Then the most hideous thing of all happened…he sat down next to me…and carried on talking.
Joking aside, the guy was really interesting and funny.
He was retired now, and had been in the removals game for many years. He told me his tales of country house clearances, of being a personal acquaintance of Lord Lichfield in years gone by, of the loneliness and boredom of living on his own.
I started to feel a bit uncomfortable, but I could tell he was just a lonely guy, wanting some kind of human contact, just someone to tell his story to, a reminder that he is still alive – has being in the world.
One fascinating anecdote he told me was about a ‘punishment logbook’ he discovered in the stables of a manor house he was clearing out in his youth.
He told me of a particular entry that had caught his eye and stayed with him over the intervening years.
A stable boy had received six strokes of a whip for being seen spitting by the Madam of the house.
I nodded at his ‘Cruel bastards’ estimation.
So I sat and listened, nodded and smiled at the appropriate moments, told a few tales of the countryside myself, and thought of the strangeness of these chance human encounters.
I noticed out of the corner of my eye, behind the bikers shoulder, a patch of white moving up the lane towards us. As it got closer, I became more and more intrigued.
It was another walker, around my age, but so attired that he kind of captured my attention.
White Fedora hat, (and despite the heat) buttoned up long sleeve denim shirt, white Chino’s, Oxford brogues, little goatee beard and specs. I kid you not.
He seemed somehow out of place and time, yet…somehow totally appropriate.
He looked the classic ‘Creative type’: maybe a painter out to capture a few sketches, or an academic, meditating on Kant’s categorical imperative after a morning lecture.
And yes, he walked up to the entrance and sat down on one of the stone bollards opposite us – another talker, another wayfarer at the crossroads.
(Oh yeah, that’s another thing, the track to the Hall continues on the other side of the lane, originally unbroken before it was bisected and scarred by modern tarmac.)
The new guy had a small canvas shoulder bag with him, and on it was printed the name of the local university I’d attended years ago. Okay, the academic guess was probably pretty near the mark. Sure, just a coincidence, but I was getting a little nervous by now.
I stood to leave, making my excuses (I was genuinely hot and sweaty) but also feeling something I couldn’t put my finger on…a feeling of a scene being enacted, like the tableau that McEwan’s character felt in the quote at the beginning.
All this is for my benefit; I’m a little pawn on a giant cosmic chessboard.
I had the compulsion to break the surreal tableau, because I think I felt on a very deep level, that to stay would mean the encounter would escalate into ever more bizarre loops and synchronicities of symbolism.
Looking back, I think I felt I’d lose my identity, or grip on reality in some strange and incomprehensible way.
I walked back the way I had come, retracing the steps of the ‘academic’, not looking back until I got to the twist in the lane.
There they both still were, but standing now in the road…and looking my way.
Maybe they weren’t looking at me, but it made me shudder a bit.
I just felt this weight of signification and meaning, like you get now and again when waking from a particularly vivid dream – the voice in your head saying: ‘remember this, its important!’
One idea struck me quite profoundly when I got home, and has stayed with me ever since.
It was as if those two characters were possible aspects of myself, almost like twin Doppelgangers that I’d projected from the depths of my own psyche.
The life of the mind, creativity, intellectualism - or the lonely older guy, speaking only of the good old days of yore and being on nodding terms with the moneyed classes.
I'm still having fun 'deconstructing' the experience three weeks later.
It felt right that I went my own way in the end, the middle path.
I still don’t believe those two ‘wayfarers’ were real even now.
Here’s a pic of Chillington Hall, this is what I could see, or we could see from our vantage point at the crossroads almost exactly, but it was a bit more green when I was there.
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