So that he would not get caught by the military police his father advised him to cycle along the tow-paths of the canals. Edgar and his brothers sat in the parlour with the map open and the curtains drawn plotting an escape route by the Trent and Mersey that would take him a good distance west before dipping to Burton-on-Trent. He had then to risk a seven-mile gap overland before getting back on to a canal which would twist its way through beautiful Leicestershire countryside to within a mile of his sister’s place.
He left Nottingham at five in the morning and rode fast, making it by late suppertime, cock-a-hoop at his success. Stretching his legs across the hearth after a well-earned meal, he heard Dolly promise he could stay as long as he liked, for he was safe with her, though he must be careful not to visit pubs or show himself in the street. Glad to have her brother in the house, at the same time she was uneasy about shielding a deserter, though when it was a question of choosing between family and country there was no doubt what she would do.
Dolly and her husband bred dogs, and Eddie went to sleep cradled in the noise of their barking, which must have been a fair relief from the yapping he had recently escaped. A few days later he was recaptured in a pub and sent back to his battalion, where he was met with an increased renewal of it.
He deserted again, and once more came home for succour. The trail was hotter for him because the British Army was obscenely desperate for flesh, never having enough men to throw into the carnage of Belgium and north-eastern France.
Edgar hid in Robins Wood beyond the Cherry Orchard, and my fourteen-year-old father biked there every day to take his food. Edgar had pitched a tent and camouflaged it with leaves and branches. Sitting outside on a log he received dishes of hot pudding and meat, and cans of tea lovingly prepared by his mother.
But a cyclist policeman followed my father, and Edgar was caught once more. He was bundled straight off to France, and sent ‘over the top’ with the 7th Battalion of the Sherwood Foresters on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
35
Out of love for the earth’s surface, as fits somebody living in mists and deserts locked in a quest for the truth, I’ve always been fascinated by maps.
From as far back as I can remember I have felt inexorably drawn to printed representations of the earth’s shape, to those delineations of the land’s crust which have the achievements of civilization stamped on them in the same sense that beautiful women of certain primitive tribes show off the elaborate designs etched on to their bodies. The first time I saw a map I wanted to leave home.
In planning a way by car from London to Leningrad, from Calais to Cordoba, or from Kiev to Venice, I enter the realm of mathematical vectors, though on the actual journeys I hardly consult the maps so that, drawn into the fluctuations of traffic and the unexpected exigencies of topography, it becomes anything but a constricting vacation.
Nothing interests me more — now as when I was a child — than to hear of a highway built where one had not existed before, or a new railway, or a shipping route opened through the ice, or a new town settled on the edge of sandy or forest wastes.
While anthropologists moan the ruination of primitive tribes when a motor road is laid along the mountain backbone of New Guinea, or the conservationists bewail another sky of fresh air polluted beyond redemption, I cannot deny my excitement at the empty quarters being amplified and recreated by man’s endeavours, no matter how misguided this might seem in a more rational moment, just as at the same time I feel a sense of loss on hearing that deserts inexorably push their sand and barrenness into fertile oases.
In peering at maps of remote parts which lack the more intensive communications of Europe and the United States, I wonder where new roads could be built for the exploitation of mineral resources. By prolonged attention I plan my own routes, but will not actually mark the map to make the new roads or railways appear more possible. Being spitted upon the truth I keep myself feeding on many worlds.
I also like obsolescent maps so as to see what the relief colours looked like without the roads which now go in bold red lines over mountain ranges and through forests. I compare sheet with sheet, and see that where the dotted lines of primitive trails were, is now a motor-road or a single-track railway line. I imagine myself an engineer in charge of a new road, initiating surveys, sweating in a tent at dusk while glancing through the plans and elevations of another stage. I would draw them perhaps with the same attention to detail as my lace-designer Uncle Frederick put into his intricate patterns before they were set up on the Nottingham machines.
It is as if maps existed before roads and railways, Were showered from space so that men would be able to set out for contiguous lands and get in touch with neighbouring tribes. The technological perfection of human maps has something magical about it. Whether the land is wild or tamed does not matter, but the links for cultural mixing and the construction of new towns make me feel safer on the earth, for it is a defence against nature and a means of sustaining civilization.
But I also know that maps can be used as despicable instruments of oppression, for hunting and rounding up, for war and plunder. The civilization they helped to create often counts its success by the number of its prisons, and it is difficult to imagine a new road being made without such buildings close behind.
This conditional love of the earth’s topography and its meticulous representation on paper leads me to wonder about the inner configuration of myself, a curiosity which falters because I know there is no fixed shape and texture of the inner man, no settled tectonic picture of the soul, no solid-and-drift in the layers of my skin.
Yet this acute comparison with the landscape of the world is because the earth alone created the people who live on it, made man and all things out of soil and sea water, moulded him by air and fire and liquid matter, moved him by fear and hunger and violence. He is and will always be at the mercy of what formed him, a multiplicity of components which, as far as searching among them for the truth is concerned, are beyond analysis.
And if emotional uncertainties are the only truths that the soul can possibly consist of, it will be a feverish and disordered map I shall finish with, that of a swamp as dangerous and untenable as where I began, perhaps even worse, for one is more likely to sink into spiritual extinction at the end of a search than at the time of setting out.
It often happens that, just before going away, I start to write a story, or even a novel. The stimulus of planning and the upset of preparation turns the senses in a creative direction, and I am prompted to tell something, though I rarely know what the end of it will be because I have to leave off and begin travelling.
The trip itself may be for no good reason except the muscle-flexing pleasure of moving on, but it cannot be denied when the veins are all set for it. It is no use protesting that whatever I wanted to say can wait till I come back, because it will never be the same again. The blood will be in a different spiritual zone, the maps around the feet redrawn, the heart and the eyes in another country.
The journey I am now a little beyond the middle point of is not the sort that takes me overland, but into the guts and around the darkness of the tripes. Myself, the earth, and time are indivisible during this peregrination, but the older I get the more it is necessary to scrape into the soil of time, even if it means digging the ground from under my feet so that I drop into the hole I have made.