Europe in Autumn

Charles was never seen again.

5 Edwin Whitton-Whyte took his mother’s maiden name of Breakhouse, and under his aunt’s care showed no interest in cartography. Despite the shame of his father’s madness he was accepted into Eton, and later went up to Oxford to study ‘Greats.’ In 1914 he enlisted and was sent to the Western Front, where he acquitted himself with distinction, rising to the rank of Sergeant.

Edwin kept meticulous journals, but only once did he refer to his father and to the Alternative Survey.

My father believed, he wrote, as did my grandfather and great-grandfather, that he had discovered a county where none exists, a landscape overlooked by the very people who occupy it. My grandfather writes of maps having a power over the land, and theorises that if an imaginary landscape is mapped in great enough detail, it will eventually supplant the actual physical landscape, as a wet cloth wipes chalk from a blackboard.

My great-grandfather, on the other hand, wrote of all possible landscapes underlying each other like the pages of a book, requiring only the production of a map of each landscape to make it real.

Whatever their motivations, my family have spent over a century exploring these theories by documenting in great detail the growth of a county called ‘Ernshire,’ which patently has no existence in the real world.

And yet today I received a letter purporting to be from my father! If he is still alive, he must be nearly a hundred years old, but though I have no memory of him I recognise his handwriting from his diaries and memoranda.

In his letter, he wishes me well, and says he is proud of me, though I do not know how he could be aware of my life-story, unless Aunt Peggy has been in contact with him. He claims to be living in ‘Ernshire.’ He begs me to visit him, and gives detailed instructions on how to get there. He says the eight-seventeen from Paddington sometimes calls at Stanhurst, and that he has ‘confidantes’ among the staff of the Windsor Branch of the South Western Railway who will ensure my safe passage to a county which does not exist.

Madness. This is patently a hoax, and I have despatched a letter instructing my solicitors, Messrs. Selhurst, Barley and Cainforth, to trace and prosecute the writer of this awful missive. I suspect one of my father’s ex-employees, though I have also been led to believe that during the scandalous summer of my birth, a member of the South Western Railway’s staff was prosecuted, in part due to the hysteria brought about by my father’s maps. I have instructed Mr Barley to trace this man as a matter of the gravest urgency.

6 Edwin Breakhouse was killed leading his men ‘over the top’ on the Somme. Many of his personal effects were never delivered to his aunt in England, among them the letter to which he refers in his journal. All record of his contact with his solicitors was destroyed when the offices of Selhurst, Barley and Cainforth burned down in April 1918, shortly after the deaths of all three senior partners in the Staines Train Disaster of March of that year.

7 Sheet 2000 may be the last remaining example of a peculiarly English sensibility, the same sensibility which induced land-owners to build ‘follies’ on their estates. A folly most often took the form of a structure with no function other than the satisfaction of its builders’ vanity, and Sheet 2000 could be seen as the Whitton-Whytes’ folly – in both senses of the word. It remains as merely an extraordinarily-detailed scrap, a remnant of a work which occupied the lives of hundreds of people over a century and a half, and perhaps a remnant of an age now long-gone.

Students of cartography will note the painstaking detail lavished not only on the spurious area of ‘Ernshire,’ but on all other areas of the map. Comparison with contemporary Ordnance Survey sheets shows a certain elegance of execution absent in the OS material. Sheet 2000, for all its faults, remains gorgeously custom-made, with all the care and attention – indeed, if the word can be used to describe a map, all the poetry – that entails. It is something which we today, with our satellite-assisted, computer-drawn maps, have lost, and recalls a time when maps did exercise a power over the landscape – if only in the imagination.

8 One anecdote remains, and though its source is uncertain and there is no way to confirm it, it is in keeping with the story of Sheet 2000, and perhaps deserves to be set down here.

In the year 1926, at the age of 94, Mrs Margaret Allen was visited by a young man who claimed to be her nephew.

Sister Ruth, who ran the nursing home where Mrs Allen spent her final years, is reported to have told a friend that the old lady was extremely excited by the encounter. Sister Ruth recalled that the young man, who called himself Stephen, spoke with an indefinable rural accent, and left Mrs Allen a certain document.

Mrs Allen jealously guarded the document given to her by Stephen, and after her death it was nowhere to be found, but Sister Ruth claimed to have seen it once, and described it as ‘a map.’

Sister Ruth, as far as is known, never described the map to her ‘friend,’ but she did mention one feature. It was marked, she said, in the bottom right-hand corner: Whitton-Whyte and Sons. Mapmakers. Stanhurst.