I walked round the old farmyard, continuing in the droveway, breathing through my mouth as deeply as I could, to clear the constriction.
To the right was the wide low slope, where in the old days the black and white cattle, especially when seen against the sky, brought to mind the condensed-milk labels we had known as children in Trinidad; and brought to mind especially a coloring competition for schoolchildren that the distributors of the condensed milk had organized one year. The drawing or outline to be colored was an enlarged version of the label itself. What pleasure, to get as many sheets with the outline as one wanted! What landscapes came to the mind of a child to whom cattle like those in the picture and smooth grassy hillsides like those in the picture (clearly without snakes) were not known!
Always on a sunny day on this walk, and especially if at the top of the slope some of the cattle stood against the sky, there was a corner of my fantasy in which I felt that some minute, remote yearning — as remote as a flitting, all-but-forgotten cinema memory from early childhood — had been satisfied, and I was in the original of that condensed-milk label drawing.
To the left, across the wide, long-grassed droveway, was a stretch of pasture now behind barbed wire. All down the pasture on the other side was a plantation of pines, now tall. Dark and thick that pine wood had seemed until one day the stubbled field behind had been set ablaze; and the thin screen of the dark pine trunks had been seen against the fire, roaring like a jungle waterfall I had once heard, giving me the idea that all matter was one, and that all disturbances, whether of fire or water or air, were the same. Just as the firing ranges beyond Stonehenge suggested by their boom that air could be punctured, and just as the military aircraft, more destructive of sky and air each year, had grown to sound like giant railway trains circling about in the sky on resonant iron rails: a magnification of the railway sound which, when I heard it coming from behind the high brick wall at the end of the Earl’s Court garden in 1950, heard it very early in the morning and late at night, had seemed to me to hold the drama and the promise of the bigger metropolitan life I had traveled to find.
Between the cattle slope and the pine screen the constriction in my chest vanished, as suddenly as it had come. I walked on to where the fenced pasture and the pine screen ended; to where, in a dip between slopes, the great rolls of hay had been stacked years before and never used and never taken away. Too black those rolls now, too mossy green in places, too close to pure rot, for them to be thought of as giant Swiss-roll cakes; too black for them to be thought of as larger newsprint rolls for the newspaper presses. Litter, debris, that black grass now, but part of the view, like the long shallow valley behind, open, never tilled, strewn with chalk and flint and looking like a valley in a higher, wilder place, strewn with dirty lumps of old snow. Beyond that, on the droveway, the land sloped up to the lark hills, the barrows and tumuli with their tufts of coarse grass and their stunted, windswept trees.
I knew the walk by heart, like a piece of music. I didn’t go all the way to the top of the down. It wasn’t necessary. I knew what I would see from there, in that light. I turned back; all the views of the walk unrolled again.
Later that evening, in my cottage, the choking fit returned. I felt my bronchial tubes contract and tighten. I waited for the fit to pass. But it didn’t; everything tightened, seized up. Within a few hours I was seriously ill, but oddly light-headed. And it was in this light-headed mood — but seeing everything with great clarity, noticing with surprise and pleasure the unusualness of the view of the valley through the dark windows of the ambulance — that I was taken to the Infirmary in the town.
I had seen the building for years and had known it was the Infirmary, the hospital, but had never thought about it, in spite of the comings and goings on the asphalt forecourt. I had seen it only as a building. I had seen remnants of the eighteenth-century brick (having learned to see age in red or reddish brick, which in 1950 I had found very ordinary, the material of little houses). I had seen the elegant Georgian letters of the legend — stating the voluntary nature of the Infirmary and giving the date, 1767—carved right along a band of stone near the top of the flat facade.
The Infirmary was on the road to the railway station. It was past the bridge: here the rivers of the chalk valleys all around met and ran together, the water always clear, giving an extraordinary brilliance to scattered pieces of litter, the water seeming (like glass paperweights or like photographs) to have the power to isolate ordinary or well-known objects and force their details on the eye.
Ten years before, illness had heightened, had given a special quality to, my discovery of spring in the manor garden. The illness of that time — brought on by mental fatigue and travel — had been, to me, though it had lasted for many weeks, like the passing tropical fevers of my childhood, fevers associated with the rainy season, fevers which I thought ran their course too soon and which I longed for again. These fevers of childhood had been welcome because, with their great relaxing internal warmth, they pleasingly distorted the sense of touch and the sense of hearing, made the world remote, then very close, played tricks with time, seeming to awaken me at many different times to the same event; and with this drama and novelty (and the special foods and “broths”) fevers always gave a feeling of home and protection.
With something like that kind of fever (and all that it implied, for the first time in England, of protection and ease) I had seen the peony below my window (in my half-waking delirium the tight red bud had grown tall on its stalk and tapped on my window in the wind); and the single blue iris among the nettles; and the thorny, scented moss roses; and the rotting bridges over the black creeks to the glory of the river, “freshing out.”
It was with real illness now, a more than passing incapacity, a fatigue that seemed to have gone beyond the body to the core and motor of my being, a fatigue that made it necessary for me to judge very carefully first how many minutes I could be up and about for, and then how many hundred yards I could walk without burning up my strength and falling ill again, it was with true illness that when I came back from the Infirmary I began, after some time, to take short turns in the sodden, ruined manor garden. Indifferent to winter for many years after I had come to England, never feeling the need for an overcoat or gloves or even a pullover, I now had a sensation of internal coldness such as I had never had before; I felt chilled in my lungs.
Grass and weeds were tall and wet, black at the roots with different kinds of vegetable rot. Autumn had once had an enchantment of its own, with the trees and bushes “burning down” in their different ways, with different tints, with the wild mushrooms imitating the color and the shape of the dead leaves they grew among; with last year’s dead aspen leaves like lace or tropical fan coral, the soft matter rotted away between the ribs or veins or supporting structure of each leaf, which yet preserved its curl and resilience. I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees. That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation. It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds. Now, with the growth of weeds and the advance of marsh plants, and the disappearance of the rose bed, to be in the garden was like being in the midst of undifferentiated bush. The sections of the fallen aspen trunks that had been too big to saw up or remove had disappeared below bush.